mMM& 



e ' r ^\T v ^ r: NtM' v7 





Class l-i -V' (*a 

Book lMTSl 

Copyright^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




EASTER-TIME 



IBS?»WV «# fiOMQSfpSS 

OCT 27 1904 

Ooovrfsfht Entrv / 
\ CLASS £LXXo. No 
t OOPT 8 







Copyright, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 
Published October, 1904. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Luxury of Children i 

Some Children in Particular 21 

Other People's Children 36 

Parents 55 

Strong Points of Infancy 72 

Naughtiness 82 

Girls and Their Education 98 

The Exchange of Children 120 

Children as an Incentive 131 

Women 145 

Real Life 159 

The Pinch of Comfort . . v . . . . . 173 

A Proper Place for Grandparents . . 186 

Winter in the Country 201 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



EASTER-TIME Frontispiece '- 

FEEDING THE CHICKENS Facing p. 24 ' 



A NEW DAY 

BREAKFAST. 

IN SCHOOL . 

SEWING . 

IN PADDLING 

SHADOW-TIME 



50 

74 

I02 

124 

176 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 



I don't know of any aspect in which Earth 
appears to better, advantage than as a play- 
ground for small children. They like it, liter- 
ally, "down to the ground," and they are 
willing to take it just as it is. If improve- 
ments are thrown in, so much the better, but 
they are not great sticklers for improvements. 
They like fences because they are good to 
climb ; they like to have the grass cut some- 
times, because haycocks are good to tumble 
over ; they like flowers, but very simple flow- 
ers will answer very well; they like the sea- 
shore — sand, sea-weed, starfish, shells, surf, 
still water — but all they ask is that it shall 
be accessible. They don't insist on having 
style and society thrown in. They beat most 
of us grown-ups in adaptability — in taking 





^ 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

what they can get and making the most of 
it. Their experience is so limited that they 
are not critical, and their imaginations are 
so active that a very moderate material basis 
gives them all the foundation they need for 
fairy-land. 

They have the advantage of their elders 
in that the real business of life with them is 
play. The time they devote to it does not 
have to be saved up from working - hours. 
They have all the time there is for play ex- 
cept what is needed for eating, which is a 
pleasant exercise ; for sleeping, which also has 
its attractive points ; and for getting washed 
and dressed from time to time, which is en- 
durable if kept within reasonable limits. And 
when they play heartily and cheerfully, they 
are doing well their share of the business of 
life. 

Most children like flowers, but some chil- 
dren love them. It was one of the merits of a 
child I know, when she was still a very little 
girl, that she loved flowers as unaffectedly as 
any grown - up person with a garden. She 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

never had much of a garden — worse luck — 
but she could be happy for hours together in 
a plain clover- field, with red- top and white- 
top clover, buttercups, and flowery weeds. 
Flowers seemed to have things to say to her, 
and she never lost a chance to hear them. 
She does not remember, as I do, how her 
grandmother, summer morning after summer 
morning, used to sally out in sunbonnet and 
the simplest of garb and spend the earliest 
hours of each new day in her flower-garden. 
For threescore years and ten Blandina's grand- 
mother loved flowers with all the fidelity of a 
strong and gentle spirit, and they seemed to 
return her affection, for they lived and grew 
and blossomed for her, as they only do for 
their true lovers. I think I know how Blan- 
dina came by her friendship for flowers, and 
I have no doubt that, when she gets around 
to it, she too will have a garden in which 
flowers will grow for love. Well, that is one 
of the luxuries of life. It is too rare a luxury 
in this country. Our rich people have splendid 
gardens, of course, but our poorer people are 

3 







**&* 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

less disposed as yet to raise simple flowers 
about their dwellings than the English are. 
Where you find the door-yard of a working- 
man's cottage abloom with flowers there is 
apt to be some old-country training — Eng- 
lish, Scotch, or German — behind it. To be 
sure, that is by no means an invariable rule; 
but flowers are the outcome of a settled life 
and of a more or less contemplative spirit, 
and we Americans are rather a restless lot as 
yet, and bent on "getting on," and much 
disposed to devote our efforts to the cultiva- 
tion of the main chance, and to put off our 
gardening until we can hire some one to do it 
for us. 

They say, indeed, that we are so devoted 
to the main chance that we neglect not mere- 
ly to raise flowers, but to raise enough chil- 
dren. Surely in so far as that is true we are 
showing ourselves to be a self-denying race. 
Are second-best things of so much moment 
to us that we deny ourselves best things in 
order to acquire them ? If we are going with- 
out children in order to acquire the necessa- 

4 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

ries of life, there is much to be said for our 
discretion; but if it is luxuries that you are 
after, what luxury is comparable to the lux- 
ury of having all the children that you want? 
Not many Americans who might have chil- 
dren forego that happiness altogether. Some 
exceptional married people don't want chil- 
dren at all, because they would interfere with 
habits of life to which these might-be parents 
have grown accustomed and attached. So 
much the worse for them. But they are rare 
people. An overwhelming majority of Ameri- 
cans who marry want children, and the only 
ground for criticising them as parents is that 
they don't want quite as many as they should. 
Aspiring for themselves, they are aspiring for 
their children too. They are loath to be load- 
ed down with large families which might make 
life too hard for them, and they hesitate to 
take responsibility for more children than 
they are confident of being able to start in life 
with a full set of ''advantages." People who 
have found existence a struggle, and good at 
that price, are less daunted by the idea of 

5 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




bringing children into the world to struggle 
than people are who have had an easier time. 
We Americans of this generation have had a 
comparatively easy time of it, and want otir 
children to have an easier time still. That is 
well enough, if we don't carry it too far; but, 
apparently, we do carry it rather too far, and 
between our careful thought for our own ease 
and our solicitude for posterity, our families 
tend to be too small. Solicitude for posterity 
has gone too far when existence has been de- 
nied to a possible citizen for fear he may never 
be able to own a steam-yacht. And solicitude 
for our own comfort has gone too far when it 
has kept down to two what should have been 
a family of four or five children, because five 
children are too many to take to Europe. Let 
Europe wait. To raise five good children is 
better than Europe. Five good children are 
an immense luxury, and to deny one's self 
other luxuries in order to raise them is not 
self-denial at all, but merely an intelligent 
choice of investment. With all our prudence 
we are usually ready to stretch a point to in- 

6 





hdMx 

. - ■■■■ > 1 1 ' < i , , 



f 




THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

dulge ourselves in a luxury that we covet. 
Then let us think of children more as luxuries 
and somewhat less as objects of expense.- 

For what other interests are comparable to 
the interests that centre in children? People 
who have had money in banks say that it is a 
pleasant sensation. People who have had 
children in school know that that is better 
still. Do you doubt it? Which will you do, 
then: will you take children out of school to 
keep money in the bank, or take money out of 
the bank to keep children in school ? Almost 
invariably you keep the children in school, 
because that is better fun and promises big- 
ger returns. There is no sort of objection to 
a simultaneous experience of both of these 
forms of gratification. They go very well to- 
gether. But if a choice must be made between 
them, what sort of a person is it that hesi- 
tates ? 

Collectors have fun of a certain sort. They 
buy pictures and porcelains and tapestries, 
and more or less beautiful works of art, and 
get them together and gloat over them. Their 

7 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

properties engage their thoughts, interest them 
in art studies, bend their faculties to the pur- 
suit of bargains, and undoubtedly add enter- 
tainment to life. Some collectors have so 
much money that they can maintain families 
and collections too. A good many others are 
childless, and have to bring grace and beauty 
into their lives by what means they may. But 
any collector who stints himself in the matter 
of children in order to enlarge his accumula- 
tion of objects of art is all kinds of an unwise 
person, and any collector who has children 
and things and loves both is vastly more 
concerned about the future of his children 
than even about what his things will finally 
bring at auction. An auction is all that col- 
lecting finally comes to, whereas to raise a 
family is to make a bid for a perpetual share 
in the interests of mankind. 

Consider too the pursuit of ordinary social 
pleasures by persons of leisure, which is held 
to be so exceptionally diverting that many 
well-to-do people are said to avoid family cares 
and responsibilities in order to chase it the 

8 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

harder. Geraldine is a nice girl, very good- 
looking, on the right side of twenty-five — 
whichever side that is — and of a stimulating 
and -unexpected turn of mind that makes her 
excellent company. She has a first-rate time 
when circumstances are favorable, and she 
gives her mind to it. When she was in New 
York last winter diversions pressed upon her 
so continuously that it was a question how she 
could find time to get her beauty-sleep and 
rest her nerves. You may not know it, but 
the maintenance of a vivacious demeanor and 
freshness of appearance is something of a tax 
on the system. To have good spirits and a 
serene temper, to look nice, to make one's en- 
gagements maintain a proper sequence with- 
out conflicting or overlapping, and to keep 
one's admiring friends in a contented frame, 
call for careful discretion and the exercise of a 
good deal of diplomatic talent. From New 
York Geraldine went to California, and the 
newspapers said she had a very good time 
there, too. She ought to have had, for I con- 
sider her a very hard-working young woman, 

9 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




as well as clever. Having Geraldine's kind of 
a good time is an interesting experience, and 
worth some trouble to acquire, but it seems 
to me that in the long run it is a bootless sort 
of effort. Suppose Geraldine goes on having 
a good time until she is thirty. She will have 
spent a lot of strength and skill, and what will 
she have to show for it? Will she have ac- 
quired anything that will make life more inter- 
esting to her at thirty-five — at forty-five — at 
seventy? I hope she will; but if she doesn't, 
so much the worse for her. 

There is a good deal of drudgery about get- 
ting married and raising a family, but you 
have something to show for it. The work has 
great compensations as it goes along, and if it 
is well done it has unrivalled and continuous 
interests in store ; whereas the good times you 
have had with contemporary playmates, 
though they have a certain value in retro- 
spect, do not constitute a very substantial 
basis for future happiness. The sort of hap- 
piness that is stable is based on a succession 
of thoughts and occupations, each one of 

10 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

which is apt to be of trifling consequence in 
itself. It is a matter of the routine of daily 
life, of the atmosphere one lives in, of hourly- 
tasks, problems, and realizations. It is in 
its ability to provide these continuous inter- 
ests in a wholesome fashion that domestic life 
beats the life of society. Once is not enough 
to live on Earth. To get experience and live 
by it is good as far as it goes, but you don't 
get all that ought to be coming to you unless 
you can live again in your children, and pass 
along some of your experience to them. To 
be sure, the transmission of the fruits of ex- 
perience can only be imperfectly accom- 
plished, but the impulse to do it is strong, 
and the effort to do it is immensely interest- 
ing, and should be, for it is by that process 
of transmission, imperfect as it is, that so- 
ciety progresses. 

This is a luxurious generation in America. 
The appetite for luxury is enormous, and the 
expenditure for its satisfaction is so vast that 
statisticians are ashamed to compute it. Let 
us consider the attractions of some rival lux- 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




uries of the less expensive sort. It costs 
about a thousand dollars a year to keep a 
boy in a good boarding-school. You pay the 
school seven or eight hundred dollars, and 
there are clothes to buy and some annual re- 
pairs to be made on the boy by doctors and 
dentists, and food and lodging to be supplied 
in vacation time, and — Oh, if you are an in- 
dulgent parent and have the money, and count 
in everything, the annual bill for the boy may 
run up to twelve hundred dollars. It costs 
about as much as that to keep a victoria in 
town. Perhaps, with good management, you 
might keep one horse and one man and a 
carriage or two throughout the year for twelve 
hundred dollars, but if you kept them in or 
near New York, your management would 
have to be careful. But in one way or another 
you could get a fairly ample provision of car- 
riage exercise for the cost of maintaining a boy 
in a good school. Your wife — of course it is 
she who would take most of the carriage ex- 
ercise — could make all her calls comfortably, 
instead of taking street-car risks in her best 

12 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 



clothes. When you went out to dinner you 
could go in a cab — which is so much the best 
way that many worthy people think it the 
only way — and sometimes, in the spring, 
when the weather invited, your wife would 
take you to drive late in the afternoon in the 
Park. That is an excellent thing to do in the 
spring in New York. Let us not disparage car- 
riage exercise, for it has its very good points. 
But it is not indispensable. It is a luxury. 
Inadequate as the means of public transpor- 
tation are in New York, you can get about 
in the street-cars, or afoot, and if you can 
choose your time it may be done fairly com- 
fortably. If you have a carriage you save 
some time and some strength, and gain in 
ease and enjoyment, but lose some exercise 
which might be good for you. Any one in 
the course of an afternoon stroll in New York 
can count up a hundred stout ladies riding 
about in victorias, who would really be better 
off, and less stout, and more active mentally, 
if they had to exert themselves more, and get 
about on foot and in the street-cars. 

13 









THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

Like as not some of them think it a greater 
luxury to have a victoria than to have a boy 
at school, but that is only because they are 
used to the victoria and do not happen to 
have a boy. For consider what profit there 
is in having a boy at a good boarding-school. 
You are interested in the boy to start with. 
When he goes to school you become interested 
in the school, and incidentally in all schools 
for boys. You get letters from the boy, and 
they are so few as to be much appreciated. 
He usually skimps them, and when he writes 
a good one it is an event. You get a report 
of his scholarship every month. If it is good, 
you rejoice; if it is bad, you lament, and stir 
him up to greater exertions. Either way you 
have the benefit of your emotions. Gradual- 
ly you get to know more or less about all the 
boys that your boy knows, and contract per- 
sonal acquaintance with some of them, so 
that you soon have an intelligent and ex- 
tended personal interest in the rising genera- 
tion. The boy comes home for the Christmas 
holidays and again in the spring, bringing 

14 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

new and stirring elements into the family life, 
bringing other boys to the house, bringing 
new tales and impressions to the family talk, 
adding new turns of language to the family 
vocabulary, acting in various ways like a 
lump of fresh yeast in the family dough. You 
have the use of the boy all summer, besides, 
and at the end of the year — if he is the right 
sort of a boy, and is at the right sort of a 
school — he is better and more valuable and 
more entertaining than he was at the begin- 
ning. Does your victoria bring you in returns 
comparable with these? Of course it doesn't. 
If you are going in for luxury and have to 
choose between a victoria and a boy, take the 
boy. 

And, of course, enjoyment of a school-boy 
isn't dependent on the ability to spend seven 
or eight hundred dollars a year on his school- 
ing. The point about that is that for eight 
hundred dollars a year, or some such sum, you 
can buy for your boy the very best schooling 
that is in the market. Money cannot buy 
any better, for schooling is a commodity the 




>r^ 








THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

value of which is very imperfectly measured 
by money. The laws of demand and supply 
have only limited effect in determining the 
price of the best grades of it. Indeed, you 
may send your boy to a public school and pay 
nothing, and get — if it happens to be a good 
one — excellent instruction, and some valuable 
experiences which no private school could 
quite match. It is a pleasure to spend money 
on a boy if you have it, and if you think you 
are giving him " advantages" which are really 
advantageous, but a boy that costs a hundred 
dollars a year, or less, may be just as satisfy- 
ing a luxury to his parents as a boy who costs 
a hundred dollars a month. The point is that 
if you have an income reasonably well adapted 
to the standard of living which you affect, and 
want all the luxuries you can afford, it will 
pay you to have some school-boys. 

So it is as to girls, only more so. It is pret- 
ty generally though not universally held that 
the best place for a boy is a good boarding- 
school, but if you live in a town where the 
schools are good, public sentiment will sustain 

16 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

you in keeping your girls at home and send- 
ing them to day-schools. No family that is 
addicted to luxury should omit to supply it- 
self duly with school-girls. Nice ones are so 
very nice — such an adornment to any prem- 
ises ; so pleasant to walk with and to joke with ; 
so stimulating to read to ! To get out a good, 
old story that you may not have read for 
thirty years, and read it aloud to your own 
school-girls, is like opening the past at a pleas- 
ant place and living it over. It is excellent 
sport to live over the past when you can choose 
the places. The story you read must be a 
good story or it won't go. But take — say 
Ivanhoe: Ivanhoe and a couple of school-girl 
listeners will insure you a pleasant half -hour 
after dinner for as much as three weeks. It 
is a great luxury to be able to count on daily 
half -hours that, barring accidents, will be 
pleasant. You can do it if you have the right 
sort of school-girls in the house, and improve 
the reasonable possibilities of the situation. 

And, of course, as your school-boy brings you 
into touch with a lot of boys, your school-girls 

17 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

make you know more or less about the girls 
they are thrown with. You get to know their 
acquaintances, and have your preferences 
among them. Then you probably try to make 
your girls' preferences coincide with yours. 
There will be girls whom you will want them 
to like, and other girls whom you would pre- 
fer to have them like less, and an astute and 
fortunate parent you will be if your prefer- 
ences are reflected in theirs. In the long run 
the social tastes of intelligent parents are usu- 
ally inherited by intelligent children. Both, 
in the end, will be apt to like the same sort of 
people for the same sort of reasons, but the 
capacity for selection is based on observation 
and experience, and it takes time to develop 
it. Selection may be influenced but it can 
hardly be forced. How is a school-girl to 
know what girls she likes until she has tried 
various sorts? That is one of the things she 
goes to school for, to form her taste in friends, 
and very interesting the process is as it un- 
folds. 

There is nobody in the world that in the 

18 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

long run is so good for us to live with as our 
own children. Several families of good peo- 
ple may share the same dwelling and live in 
peace. Unattached people who are congenial 
may join forces and share expenses and get on 
well. Lonely people may hire companions; 
impecunious people may band together, with 
or without friction, and do better in combi- 
nation than they could do separately. And, 
of course, people can, and do, live in boarding- 
houses and hotels and justify that arrange- 
ment. But for choice, almost every family 
prefers to live its own separate life in its own 
separate dwelling. That is the ideal way, 
and it matters not so very much whether the 
dwelling is great or small, dear or cheap, pro- 
vided it is healthy and the life that goes on 
within it is well ordered and harmonious. 

For any one to be able to choose a group of 
people out of the various millions on the earth 
as those with whom he would prefer to live, 
and live with them, seems a momentous privi- 
lege. Yet it is a privilege which millions of 
people in ordinary circumstances en j oy . Whom 

i9 







*#s&* 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

would I live with if I had my choice? With 
Mr. Kipling, Mr. Dooley, President Roosevelt, 
and the Emperor William? These strenuous 
gentlemen would make an interesting com- 
pany. The talk would be good ; but, after all, 
they would not be my choice. My preference 
would be to live with Jonas, Clementine, 
Blandina, and their mother. I am more in- 
terested in them than in other people ; their 
purposes in life fit in better with mine, and 
habit has made them more tolerant of my 
company than other folks would be. I like 
my own best to live with, and you like yours, 
and Jones and Smith like theirs. We all have 
our choice, and live most with the people we 
like best, giving praise to our Maker that 
natural affections, which are comparatively 
easy to command, should be so incomparably 
desirable. 






SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 




It is not the custom in our family to return 
thanks after food, but seven-year-old Blan- 
dina, who is very deliberate about taking her 
simple nourishment, is apt, when she has fin- 
ished what has been set before her and taken 
off; her bib, to get down from her chair and 
kiss both her parents. Such a demonstration 
has never been expected, much less exacted, 
from Blandina. It is an impulse from within 
— the outward sign of replenished energies 
and of a prompt and instinctive appreciation 
of the blessings of this life. 

Those blessings Blandina has always ap- 
preciated. She has always been glad to be 
alive. She wakes in the morning benignly 
disposed towards all creation. She is glad 
when it is breakfast- time, glad to go to school, 

21 




THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




glad to come home, glad to get her luncheon, 
glad, after lunch, to go to the park, or to shop, 
or to read or play at home, or to do anything 
that comes handy. And when the gas is 
lighted, and the hour for bread-and-milk and 
dropped eggs comes around, she greets those 
restoratives with enthusiasm. It cannot truth- 
fully be said of her that she is glad to go to 
bed. Usually she goes with reluctance and 
sometimes with tears; but once abed, her 
pleasant impressions of existence reassert 
themselves, her philosophy returns, and 
the current of her affections resumes its 
course. Somehow, Blandina's affections seem 
to be always in commission. She is a 
person of considerable wilfulness, not with- 
out temper, not at all indifferent to getting 
her full share of any good thing that may 
be in course of distribution. Her tears flow 
readily and often, but dry incredibly soon. 
There never was a child more appreciative 
of the pleasures of consolation. I suppose 
that if she were analyzed by a competent 
hand the report would note traces of jealousy 






SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 

and selfishness. Nevertheless, she has the 
great charms of repose and good-will. The 
repose comes from the capacity to be satis- 
fied with favorable conditions for a consider- 
able period at a time. When she has been 
duly wound up she goes steadily until she 
runs down. The good -will is an accident of 
birth. Blandina was born comfortable in 
mind and body, and affectionately disposed 
towards mankind and all nature. She looks 
always with interest into the world's mirror 
and sees pleasant things there. That is the 
gold spoon in her baby mouth. That is what 
makes her blunt nose, with all its freckles, 
seem an advantageous feature. That is what 
makes her more valuable as a mundane pos- 
session than a pretty big bunch of bonds with 
gilt on their edges and coupons attached. 
The coupons only come off the bonds twice a 
year, but the interest on Blandina accrues by 
the hour, and the payments are generous and 
constant. 

The disgruntled person who thought that 
life might be tolerable if it were not for its 

23 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

pleasures was unable, probably, to command 
the simple and profitable form of satisfaction 
which comes from living in the house with a 
nice child. To be sure, one nice child is a 
scant allowance. At least five is preferable, 
if one can find keep and education for so many. 
Jason Jackson, of Boston, who loves all sports, 
and searches life's pockets for pleasures, ap- 
preciates children with a man's irresponsible 
joy, and loves to have them about in all stages 
of growth. It was he who admitted, with a 
new baby in his lap, that he liked to have al- 
ways one nice, soft one in the house. All prop- 
erly constituted parents share that liking, 
though it is a very exceptional family nowa- 
days that lives persistently up to its prefer- 
ences in this particular. It is the disposition 
of all the world in these days to run to town; 
and town life, full of distractions and elabo- 
rations, and calculations and costs, undoubt- 
edly favors small families. The possession of 
great treasures inevitably involves cares, and 
mothers remember, even if fathers forget, that 
children don't grow up as they should with- 

24 






FEEDING THE CHICKENS 




SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 

out thought being taken for them. One child 
is a more anxious charge than two or three, 
but more children than two or three means 
more care, and it is possible that of care there 
may be an over-supply. Then, too, the dis- 
tribution of living space in cities is not at all 
sensible. The rule ought to be that the larg- 
est families should have the largest houses. 
The rule is, with due exceptions to prove it, 
that the size of one's domicile is in inverse 
proportion to the size of one's family. That 
is because the more of the family income goes 
for food, clothes, and schooling the less re- 
mains for rent. The world is full of just such 
rules invented for the confusion of parents. 
Nevertheless, though there are folks to whom 
children are a trial, and to whom a certain 
scale of living, and strawberries in March, and 
the opera, and timely journeys, and various 
privileges of an unencumbered life, are worth 
more than young faces at the breakfast-table 
and kisses at bedtime, the general conclusion 
of mankind is that nice children are God's 
best gift. 

25 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




Some persons of a superior virtue live child- 
less in the married state and love one another, 
and keep the peace, and find interests in life 
that afford them due entertainment; but the 
success which they make in living — when they 
do make it — is the triumph of character over 
circumstances, and it takes superior virtue to 
compass it. We should always admire and 
respect such persons as beings superior to 
their fate, and, conversely, we would seem en- 
titled to think rather small potatoes of mar- 
ried people who, with children to help them, 
don't manage to live harmonious. In the 
case of such a couple it is pretty safe to con- 
clude that about one or the other of them there 
is something very much amiss, since with the 
greatest luxury in life vouchsafed to them 
they cannot profit by it. 

To have a family and no means of support 
is a serious predicament, and it is not bettered 
by the fact that the family is large. A family 
with a bad physical or mental inheritance, or 
in the hands of incompetent parents, is not 
likely to be a blessing or a valuable asset in 

26 





SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 

the world. But a family of well-born chil- 
dren, committed to parents who appreciate 
their charge and are equal to it, is one of the 
very best things going. The very best and 
most important thing in the world is folks. 
Without them the world would be a mere 
point in space, and of no account except as 
a balance weight. All that ails the world as 
it is is a shortage of folks of the right quality. 
Of everything else there is enough to go around. 
Consequently, the most valuable gift that can 
come to earth through man is rightly consti- 
tuted children. Beside them all other forms 
of wealth are defective. Money is an excel- 
lent thing in so far as it enables one to com- 
mand health and power and education and 
opportunity, and promotes one's usefulness, 
but children are a power and an unceasing 
entertainment, and constitute usefulness im- 
mediate and prospective. While money 
tempts to idleness, children are an incentive 
to industry; where money makes for self-in- 
dulgence, children make for self-denial ; where 
money is an aid to vagrancy, children neces- 

27 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




sitate a home and some adherence to it. 
Money in superfluous quantities is a recog- 
nized demoralizer, but every good child is a 
moralizer to its parents. Can there be any 
question, then, that to accumulate a reason- 
able number of children is better worth one's 
while than to accumulate an unreasonable 
amount of money? Not a bit; and yet the 
world is full of ignorants whose ideal of the 
condition of happiness is to have a very large 
fortune and a very small family. To such 
persons to raise more than two children seems 
a flight in the face of Providence and a reck- 
less preference for the poor-house as the refuge 
of one's declining days. Great is prudence; 
but it is worth remembering that there are 
chances of raising too few children as well as 
too many, and while it is an embarrassment 
to have a young family on one's hands and 
run out of funds, it is also an embarrassment 
to find one's self past middle life and fairly in 
funds but short of children. The man who 
has exercised such discretion as to reach the 
age of fifty without having any children to 





f". ;~/>/ y 






SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 



fall back on has probably, if he has any sense, 
passed the period when he admires his own 
prudence, and has come to think of himself 
as one who has wasted his opportunities. 

We are amiss in that we don't think of 
children as wealth. Our minds are apt to 
dwell unduly on the cost of raising them and 
starting them in the world and not enough 
on the profit of them. We speak of Jenkins 
as " a poor man with a very large family," as 
though a man with a large family could justly 
be regarded as poor, provided the family was 
of good quality. Jenkins has only six or seven 
children, and can feed and clothe and love 
them all, and sends them to school, and has 
fun with them — thanks to his having a very 
able wife. We also speak of Disbrow as a 
rich man with one daughter, as though a man 
with much money and only one daughter 
could justly be called rich. We are not very 
accurate in our use of language. If a man 
who has valuables is rich, Jenkins is very well 
off, and we should recognize it in our thoughts 
of him ; whereas a man with much money and 

29 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

only one daughter is but one step removed 
from want. 

Excessively rich people rarely raise large 
families nowadays, and there are good reasons 
for it. They haven't time, for one thing. 
Conscientious parents, be they rich or poor, 
don't want to neglect their children or to turn 
them over entirely to hired supervision. You 
might almost as well not have children as not 
live with them and be bothered with them. 
But six or seven children constitute for many 
years almost a complete occupation for a 
mother, and women who can command the 
various exercises that money can buy are 
loath to spend too large a share of their lives 
in the service of childhood. You can't take 
a troop of children abroad in the spring, to 
Newport in the summer, to Lenox in the fall, 
to New York in the winter, and to Florida in 
February. They have to go to school, for 
one thing; and, for another, it isn't healthy 
for them to keep them on the road. Any 
travelling circus-man will tell you that it's 
hard to keep the menagerie cubs alive while 

3° 






SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 

the show is moving. There's no place for 
children like almost any plain home where the 
plumbing is safe and the water can be boiled, 
and where you think your doctor knows the 
milkman. But if you are going to stay at 
home, there's no special point about being 
egregiously rich; so the families of the ex- 
tremely opulent as a general thing are small. 
Another thing : where there is a fortune of one 
hundred and fifty millions or more, it always 
seems a pity to split it into more than two or 
three pieces. It is well enough as endow- 
ments after the division, but it is spoiled as a 
curiosity. When a collection of money has 
been made so nearly complete that it approach- 
es the condition of being a phenomenon, there 
is a natural reluctance on the owner's part to 
cut it up into mere incidents. Accordingly, 
the incalculably rich do not, as a rule, care for 
a large group of heirs; one or two answer as 
well as a dozen. As far as raising a large 
family goes, a man with only two or three 
millions is better off than though he were 
really opulent, for if he has ten children he 

3 1 

.. .... JUT 




>r^> 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

can provide for them all, and educate them, 
and give them a handsome start in life, and 
still have enough left to live and die on and 
make his widow happy. The idea of being 
''worth" a hundred and fifty millions, and 
raising as large a family as such a fortune 
would warrant, is not a practical idea, albeit 
it is a dream of a grand family. 

The interminable variety in children has its 
good points and its disadvantages. If they 
were more alike they would be less interesting, 
but it would be more nearly possible to feel 
that a family was sometimes complete. But » 
the possibilities of heredity are inexhaustible. 
One child inherits this or that from its moth- 
er and something else from its father, and an- 
other in selecting the composite qualities in 
which it is to clothe itself may skip its parents 
altogether and go back to grandparents or 
forebears still more remote. This lends an in- 
terminable excitement to the rearing of fam- 
ilies. The certainty that no new-comer will 
be a duplicate of any child in being stirs in 
the optimist thoughts of combinations of 

3 2 






SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 

powers and perfections the development of 
which it would be a life-long delight to watch. 
The records of some younger children, late- 
comers in large families, who have been born 
with great endowments and turned out to be 
great people, must always be an aggravation 
to ambitious parents whose families are small. 
To know of whole series of wonders which 
have been accomplished by seventh sons is 
disconcerting to folks to whom a seventh son 
is an impossible luxury ; but they may always 
comfort themselves by remembering that a 
small family well raised is more likely to re- 
joice its parents than a big one neglected. 

But that introduces the question of what 
a good bringing-up consists in. As to that, 
the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We 
will all agree that children should learn to 
read and write and speak the truth; that it 
is good for them to love and be loved; that 
they ought not to be so snowed under with 
what are called " advantages" as to stifle 
their natural development; that the aim of 
education is to bring out the good and the 

33 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

strength there is in the child, and not to shape 
it by main strength according to some precon- 
ceived idea of parent or teacher. 

The people who are of most account in the 
world are the people who work. We certain- 
ly do not want our children to grow up into 
do-nothings. We want them to learn to 
work as hard and as successfully as possible. 
We want them also to be good, and to keep 
out of mischief, and to be pleasant. We want 
them, if possible, to be so trained as to be 
able to work advantageously at things where- 
of the pursuit is agreeable and stimulating, 
and which bring rich rewards to successful 
labor. 

We shall not be content with a development 
of mind or of body which the heart does not 
share. If our children are successful solely 
for themselves, and not for us, too, and for 
others as well, we shall not feel entirely proud 
of their raising. We all feel, though, that the 
common lot is not quite good enough for our 
children. We hope for them that they may 
not drudge interminably at weary tasks. We 

34 





SOME CHILDREN IN PARTICULAR 

want to command for them the brighter as- 
pects of life. We cannot be sure of accom- 
plishing that, but if we are wise enough, and 
not too selfish or too lazy ourselves, we can 
do a good deal towards it. Unworthy peo- 
ple who are shrewd and selfish and unscrupu- 
lous get a good deal in this world that is rated 
as valuable, but, after all, the use that they 
are able to make of what they get depends 
upon what they are. We want our children 
to grow up to be such persons that ill-fortune, 
if they meet with it, will bring out strength in 
them, and that good - fortune will not trip 
them up, but make them winners. To fight 
the battle of life under hard conditions and 
fall on the field is not inglorious, but to be 
turned loose in fields that are white, and gath- 
er no satisfying harvest, ah ! that is a sad fate. 
We should try by all means to save our chil- 
dren from that. One may miss most of the 
comforts of life and still succeed, but to have 
good chances and waste them all is failure. 

35 






p^ 




^s^ 



OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 



It has come to be usual when there is a 
great procession to bring out the boys of the 
public schools and make them a part of it. 
Their uniforms are incomplete. They don't 
carry weapons, or, if they do, the weapons 
add nothing to the effect. They march, usu- 
ally, pretty well, but there is very little 
pomp or panoply about them. They are 
placed far down the line, near its latter end, 
and if the procession is a long one they don't 
come into view until the eyes are more or less 
wearied with watching the long succession 
of regiments and military organizations which 
form the more brilliant part of the show. 
And yet when the school-boys come along in 
their belated turn there is a notable quicken- 
ing in the interest of the spectators. Far 

36 






OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

down the line you hear cheering, vigorous and 
strong, from crowds that a moment before 
had seemed jaded. ''What's that?" You 
lean forward and look down the street. " Oh! 
the school-boys are coming !" And when they 
come, proud, intent, heads up, eyes to the 
front, and their best foot forward, you cheer, 
too, and if you stop it is because you have to 
set your teeth to keep your tears back. A lot 
of boys; lots and lots of boys in marching 
ranks! That's all. What ails you? What 
stirs you? What is there so moving about 
all these urchins? You don't know. You 
only know that you always have sensations in 
the throat when the school-boys go by, and 
have to wink and swallow to keep from being 
too visibly affected. You see other persons 
using like measures of restraint. There's noth- 
ing sad about the boys ; they are in dead ear- 
nest, that is all. Yet their youth touches us 
wonderfully. They are the Future, incarnate, 
devoted. They march to dooms of which we 
know a little more than they, but of which 
neither we nor they know much. What bat- 

37 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




ties are ahead for them! What decimations, 
recurring and inevitable, wait for those de- 
voted legions! But they have no misgivings. 
The great horn throbs; the bugle shrills; in 
step with drum-beats on goes boyhood march- 
ing where God wills. 

These are other people's children that we 
have been watching. Our boys, maybe, are 
off at school. Our girls are looking out of 
yonder window. All this emotion and dis- 
turbance and pride have been, not over individ- 
ual children, but over childhood. When we 
are asked if we like children, we are used to 
say that it depends upon the child; that we 
like some children, just as we like some grown 
persons, and others we don't like, or like less. 
That is true, but it isn't the whole truth, for 
children as children do appeal to most of 
us in a way that grown-ups don't. We feel 
towards all children something of paternal 
solicitude. An instinct prompts us to pro- 
tect the young, and in most of us it is stronger 
than our nerves, our tempers, or our fears. 
The pains and distresses that befall children 

38 






OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

and which we can't help, we don't want to 
know about. When grown-ups die, it is the 
common lot, and we don't grieve unless we 
have personal reasons. But a child's death 
that seems uncalled for hurts us. When a 
child is lost we search the newspapers till we 
read that it has been found. When a child is 
stolen, anywhere, the news, when it gets 
thoroughly around, excites the whole country. 
Of course we love children; our own best; 
other folk's children, too ; preferring those who 
are most lovable, but more or less solicitous 
about all. 

To people who have children of their own, 
other children are relatively interesting as 
members of the generation to which their 
children belong and factors in their children's 
development. They offer useful means of 
comparison. What I know of Johnny Green 
and William Carter, coevals of my Jonas, helps 
me to determine whether at this period of his 
development Jonas is getting in fair measure 
what ought to be coming to him. I compare 
his scholarship with theirs, his height, weight, 

39 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

and physical stability, his energy, his manners, 
and his character. They are of his world, 
and his place in it is going to be determined 
in the long-run by the relation his qualifica- 
tions bear to theirs and those of their like. 
I trust I am not inordinately ambitious for 
Jonas, but I want him to have his due, and I 
know he won't get it unless somehow he can 
manage to demonstrate that it is his. If 
William Carter is able and industrious enough 
to lead the class, Jonas and I don't propose 
to grudge him that distinction. If Johnny 
Green can outwrestle his fellows, Jonas in a 
cheerful spirit will contribute a fall to his list 
of victories. But so far as any influence of 
mine with Jonas can effect it, they shall both 
work faithfully for their distinction. That 
leaders should lead, that superior parts should 
gain superior rewards, is essential to progress. 
That is a part of the great scheme whereof 
the millennium is to be the ultimate result, 
and it is not for us to dispute its wisdom. 
The competition that develops leadership, 
discernment, resolution, and other precious 

40 





<zy 




OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

qualities is perfectly healthy, and ought to 
be sweet-tempered and wholesome. To make 
the best of one's self is to show appreciation of 
the handiwork of one's Maker. If William's 
best is better than Jonas's, it will help Jonas 
by stimulating his efforts ; and Jonas, in turn, 
if he crowds William hard, will keep him well 
up to his pace. This is one of the great ser- 
vices that other folk's children do us. They 
help us get out of our children what is in them. 
We could hardly do it without them. A Rus- 
kin may grow up solitary and leave a great 
name. We can be thankful for what he gave 
the world and yet suspect that with wiser 
rearing he would have given it still more. Our 
children need companionship, the stimulation 
that comes from good-humored rivalry, the 
stress of such a generous combat as is suited 
to their years. Competition carried to an ex- 
treme is ugly. Where there are not necessaries 
enough to go around, finer natures will con- 
tend, not to see who shall have the most, but 
the least. But in this competition of children 
pursuing strength and knowledge the store is 

4i 





/^5§W)^\ 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




boundless, and the more of it the leader gets, 
the more will each one get who competes with 
him. 

When the human disposition to take thought 
for the future goes beyond the care for per- 
sonal necessities and becomes a solicitude for 
mankind in general, the scriptural injunction 
in restraint of it doesn't apply. Nothing is 
going to break men — the best men — of their 
interest in the future. The natural human 
craving for immortality, which is bred of the 
obvious incompleteness of life on earth, en- 
ters into it. We lay up money — some of us 
do — against the future, and don't give over 
doing it for all that we know what a dubious 
rampart it is, and how uncertain is the fate 
of savings when the thrifty hand that gathered 
them lets go. In our day and in our country 
the great cause for which money is most will- 
ingly poured out by bequest or by living hands 
is the training of the young. The feeling is 
that what makes better people makes a better 
world and a better future. Givers, though in- 
numerable objects appeal to them, give most 

42 





OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

bountifully to education and to what con- 
cerns the training of the young. It would 
not be incomprehensible if the great money- 
makers should say, "Knowledge is power; 
health is power; let us make them scarce that 
our descendants, having both, may have the 
greater advantage." That would be selfishly 
provident in a certain way, even though it 
would be short-sighted. But our givers fol- 
low no such reasoning. They leave, indeed, 
accumulated money to the exclusive use of 
their descendants for better or worse. Many 
of them strive while they live to monopolize 
certain means and processes of money -making, 
but they don't try to build up monopolies in 
knowledge or in health. They were men be- 
fore they were monopolists. They are men to 
the end. All children seem to be theirs. For 
all children, for all youth, they strive to open 
the paths to usefulness and all its rewards. 
That the fit shall come to their own, that the 
less fit shall improve, that genius shall not lack 
its tools nor industry its opportunity — these 
things are more to them than the chances or 

43 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




mischances of their remote descendants. "I 
have earned my advantage," says one; "why 
shouldn't I profit by it ? But I want the next 
generation to have as fair a chance as I have 
had." 

We have heirs of our bodies and' heirs of 
our minds and spirits. The truest heirs of 
the strong man are they whom his spirit 
quickens. They may be of his blood, they 
may not — but they are to take up his work, 
and for them he does well to take thought. 
If a man has children, the farther he looks into 
the future the more diffused is the thin stream 
of blood that has passed through his veins 
and the slighter the relationship that his de- 
scendants bear to him. If he looks far enough 
ahead, the progeny of his progeny blend into 
the general mass of mankind, and he sees in 
himself merely a unit of the world that is and 
a progenitor of the world that is to be. By 
as much as his relationship to prospective in- 
dividuals grows less important to him, his re- 
lationship to the general mass of coming men 
should grow more important. No man, be 

44 





OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 



he ever so great or ever so strong, can be sure 
that his line will not run out, or that any kind 
of sceptre or any accumulation of wealth that 
he may hand down will not pass out of his 
descendants' hands. But he can be reason- 
ably sure that all lives will not run out, and 
that what he does on the earth that is worth 
doing will last and some one will fall heir to 
it. If he leaves anything worth inheriting 
he will have heirs. They may be his children, 
but they are almost as likely to be other peo- 
ple's children. His impulse, if he has it, to 
provide for childhood and for youth in general 
is sound and natural, for, after all, it is the 
expression of his desire that his own shall 
come to their own. 

But all this is a good way from home. The 
other people's children that interest us par- 
ents most violently are those that our children 
are, or are to be, thrown with. We ought to 
wish that our children may be thrown with 
children on whom, by their fine graces of char- 
acter, they may have an improving effect. 
We ought to send our children out like little 

45 









THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

missionaries into a world that is to profit by 
their companionship. I have not observed 
that parents live up very generally to this hon- 
orable aspiration. Incidentally, it may be ac- 
complished, but the more usual disposition is 
to take thought, not so much as to whose 
children our children can most benefit, but 
what children they can most profit by. Very 
nice children indeed, well - mannered, well- 
trained, sweet-tempered, and intelligent, are 
the sort we prefer as our children's compan- 
ions, and especially as companions for our 
girls. We seem more solicitous, if possible, 
that our charges should get grace by associa- 
tion than impart it. That seems greedy, but 
it is at least a compliment to other parents. 
What is our test of schools? Do we study 
the list of courses and inquire diligently as to 
the capacity of teachers ? To some extent we 
do, but much more we judge them by their 
fruits. 

Clementine is getting old and expects to 
swap schools next year, and hasn't made up 
her mind yet which of several seminaries for 

4 6 






OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

girls is to have her valuable patronage. We 
are investigating the subject, she and I. We 
do it chiefly in the morning just before nine 
o'clock, as we walk down Fifth Avenue to the 
school she goes to now. Every morning we 
meet squads of the pupils of the other schools, 
and observe them with unfailing interest. 
Their comeliness, the modishness of their rai- 
ment, their health, spirits, manners — nothing 
about them fails to receive our attention. We 
even note how many of them come in cabs 
and how many drive their own carts. Our 
idea is that schools are best known by their 
fruits, and though appearances are deceitful 
and don't always indicate flavor, still, looks 
and demeanor certainly count for something. 
I can't find that the desire to improve either 
her mind or her companions has much weight 
with Clementine. What she is looking for is 
the best lot of girls, according tq her standards ; 
and even that is subordinate to her inten- 
tion to go, if possible, to the same school 
that Gertrude goes to. Gertrude is some 
one else's child, and goes to Clementine's 

47 




>r^> 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

present school, and Clementine enjoys her 
society. 

As for Blandina, she knows where she is 
going. There is not and has not been the 
least uncertainty. All Miss Adams's girls may 
come to school in carts. Miss Bacon's girls 
may be ever so nice, and Miss Bacon's vogue 
ever so sweeping, Blandina is to go neither 
to Miss Adams's nor to Miss Bacon's. She is 
going to Miss Camp's. It is a graded school, 
and graded schools don't suit all girls. It 
hasn't been necessary to consider whether 
they especially suit Blandina, because any 
good school seems to suit Blandina. 

Camilla Drayton has not been to school at 
all yet, so far as I have heard, not even to 
dancing-school. She is an only child, and is 
being carefully reared. She has a governess. 
Thev don't let her ride in the street-cars for 
fear she will catch something. They seem to 
want her to have measles, whooping-cough, 
chicken-pox, German measles, mumps, and 
the other things, after she is grown up and 
can appreciate them better. Well, she is an 

48 





OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

attractive person, and it is sad to think she 
has so many experiences ahead of her. 

In our family we have had everything but 
small-pox and scarlet - fever, and those we 
hope to avoid. To have got through measles 
and whooping-cough is like having paid-up 
life-insurance. It is surprising that some of 
the parents of other people's children should 
be at so much pains to avoid experiencing so 
agreeable a sensation. It seems to me that 
Camilla's mother is too distrustful of the 
common lot, and over-solicitous to avoid what 
happens to be in the air. If she is, she has 
merely fallen into an error that few mothers 
of only children are able to avoid. They 
want their darlings to learn to swim, but pre- 
fer that they shall learn in the bath-tub at 
home. Competition, and the wisdom that 
comes from attrition with one's coevals, are 
doubtless less indispensable to girls than to 
boys. A boy who is to make his own way 
must learn to know and deal with other boys. 
With a girl's success, competition has less to 
do. Instinct and native grace and mother- 

49 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

ing do more for her. She may accomplish 
her destiny without any very wide experience 
of other girls. And yet her dealings with 
other people's children will be unlucky in- 
deed if there is not a great deal more of 
profit in it than of loss. It should yield her 
friendships, and a girl's friendships for girls 
are affairs of great moment, or else story- 
writers are mistaken. It should develop her 
discriminations, too. How is a girl to learn 
the true inwardness of girls, or which she likes 
and which she doesn't like, and why, unless 
she is thrown with them? How else than 
by personal investigation is she to gather the 
wisdom about femininity which is to be so 
useful to her daughters, and her sons, when 
she has them? 

Children in families where there are other 
children get on better without other people's 
children than only children do, but even they 
need other people's children for their develop- 
ment. The elder children in families are apt 
to assume such authority as they may over 
the younger ones, and the younger ones are 

5o 








— : ...J,^,.^ -_-. . 









A NEW DAY 



OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

apt to dispute it, and it isn't an uncommon 
thing for sisters to quarrel. That is not nec- 
essarily a great matter. It does not imply 
lack of affection, but only the clashing of 
forces neither of which one would spare. But, 
of course, it may be overdone, and it is pref- 
erable that energy of this sort should not be 
too much developed in one's own household, 
and that both likes and dislikes should find 
some field for cultivation away from home. 
Excellent lessons of toleration, of live and 
let live, are to be learned by association with 
other folks' children. 

"I have been surprised," says Aunt Matil- 
da to Clementine's mother, "to see how well 
Clementine has hit it off with my Jane since 
she has been visiting us. They seemed to get 
on perfectly, and yet both Jane and Clemen- 
tine have been thought to be rather 'bossy.' ' 

So they are, each in her own field. Both 
Jane and Clementine have younger sisters, 
and feel authorized to lay down the law to 
them when circumstances seem to warrant 
it. But laying down the law to any one else 

5 1 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

than a younger sister is a different matter, 
and they instinctively feel the inexpediency 
of that. Yet they observe and reflect, and 
no beam that may be in their own eye is likely 
to be big enough to make them blind to the 
neighbor-child's mote. 

"Mother," says Clementine, "you should 
have heard Jane talk to little Lucy. When 
Lucy turned in her chair at dinner to look 
out of the window, she said: 'Don't turn 
around in your chair at table. It isn't man- 
ners.' When Lucy helped herself to succo- 
tash, Jane said : ' Don't take so much. It 
isn't manners.' And yet when the dish came 
to her she took more than any one else. She 
kept after Lucy about something the whole 
time." 

Yet this is the same twelve - year - old 
Clementine who has been so prone to harass 
nine-year-old Blandina with admonition and 
censure. Instruction as to her own faults 
has at least enabled Clementine to recognize, 
disapprove, and tolerate those faults in other 
children. 

52 






OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN 

Older children will not wish to be always 
restricted to the company of younger ones, 
and younger children will find relief in con- 
sorting part of the time with their coevals, 
who cannot claim to know better than they 
do, nor assert an authority that is founded 
in a longer experience of life. There are ad- 
vantages about being a younger child. Young- 
er children escape mistakes of training from 
which older ones suffer, and they have usually 
a beaten path to follow which their elders had 
the trouble of making. But the beaten path 
is sometimes irksome, and the natural pre- 
sumption of older children that the way they 
have learned is the best way is not always 
well founded. Be considerate of younger 
children. Take care that they are not run 
too invariably in the family groove, and that 
their power of initiative is not governed out 
of them. If they are obstreperous, and show 
a disposition to be the architects of their own 
fortunes and to break their own paths, re- 
member what a superfluity of guidance they 
are apt to have. However great the solici- 

53 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

tude they excite at home, and however much 
affection and kindness they give and take 
there, for them the field is a little fairer and 
a little better for their development when the 
children in it are other people's children and 
the terms are equal. 

54 






PARENTS 



It is a theory in our family that discipline 
is a maternal function. It found expression 
the other night when we were playing whist. 
As we cut for a new deal the clock struck 
eight, and eight o'clock still being bedtime 
in our family, all three children furtively look- 
ed around at their mother, who lay on the 
sofa with her eyes closed. Then it was that 
one of the family maxims first clothed itself 
in language. Some one said, softly, "Let a 
sleeping mother lie!" and the new deal pro- 
ceeded. 

We have realized the existence of that max- 
im for years past, and lived up to it so far as 
it promoted our own comfort. It would be 
a good deal more to our credit if we had prac- 
tised it more thoroughly and unselfishly. Un- 

55 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

happily, the sleeping mother in our abode lies 
undisturbed just about so long as it better 
suits the aims and purposes of the younger 
members of the family to let her rest. When 
Clementine wants to know, she can't wait ; and 
when Jonas teases Blandina beyond the very 
moderate limits of her patience, Blandina re- 
torts with due outcries, and if Discipline hap- 
pens to be dozing, it has to rouse itself and 
supervene. How fierce it is! How excoriat- 
ing in censure! How adamantine in injunc- 
tion! Oh, a real lion! — lo the claws and the 
tawny mane and terrifying eyes! Nothing 
less could reduce Jonas' s vociferous defence 
to tearful and somewhat injured meekness, 
and drive Blandina to the sugar-bowl for sol- 
ace, and make Clementine careless for the 
moment whether she knew or not. Poor chil- 
dren, to be caged with so fierce a creature! 
And yet they are fairly efficient tamers. Look 
at them all, in the same cage, half an hour 
later. What! That a lion that they are all 
sitting on at once? That creature fierce? 
That a tawny mane? No, no! A fleece, a 

56 





/ 




PARENTS 

woolly fleece; and yet — odd phenomenon — 
the creature doesn't bleat, she purrs. 

Almost any kind of a parent will do at a 
pinch, except a liar. If we are exceptionally 
commendable persons, as people go, so much 
the better for our children, for like not only 
breeds like, but trains like, and "good father, 
good child," is a fairly reliable rule, though 
"good mother, good child," is a somewhat 
surer one. But even if we are not notably 
exemplary, we may hope to get along as par- 
ents if only we are honest. We may as well 
make up our minds in the first place that in 
so far as we are reproduced in our children, 
and in so far as we influence them, it is what 
we really are that is reproduced and that has 
influence, and not what we pretend to be. 
Judicious grafting and training do some curi- 
ous feats. Families of figs — somewhat prick- 
ly, but still figs — are sometimes raised from 
what seems thistle stock. In such cases it 
will be found that there was more fig in the 
stock than appeared, or else that the young 
shoots fell into very good hands and had ex- 

57 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




cellent culture, or else that the parent thistles 
themselves yearned sincerely to be figs,, and 
tried to, and transmitted their aspirations and 
the fruits of their efforts. But parents who 
are thistles at heart, and in intention and 
practice, won't raise figs merely by cloaking 
their true inwardness with occasional fig 
leaves. Like begets like. Gentleness is not 
induced by stormy exhortation, nor manners 
by precept alone. Conduct in children is the 
resultant of various forces of training, instinct, 
and imitation, and of the three the last is not 
the least. 

Every parent who allows himself the luxury 
of his children's society may expect to be imi- 
tated in such measure as each child approves. 
Such imitation is a form of obedience, even 
though it may accord very imperfectly with 
the word of the paternal command. When I 
set Jonas an example, I count with fair con- 
fidence on his appreciation of it. He will 
imitate me, not, perhaps, in my exemplary 
action, but in setting an example. He will 
set an example on fit occasion to Blandina 





PARENTS 

and Clementine, and the example he sets will 
bear about the same relation to the general 
line of conduct which his fallen nature prompts 
as the example I set does to mine. That is 
why I do not hold very closely to the Sunday 
school injunction to set good examples. With 
fairly clever children it cannot be trusted to 
work well. Their instinct of imitation is too 
quick and thorough. Unconsciously they 
pick up the parental hypocrisies and adopt 
them, and pass them along. I don't pretend 
not to subject myself to some reasonable re- 
straints of conduct on account of Jonas and 
his sisters. They are all, for example, so in- 
telligently critical as to quality in food that 
I try to restrain, when they are at the table, 
a propensity to grieve audibly if the plates 
are not hot or the soup lacks flavor. Even 
if Jonas feels as I do about hot plates and 
tasteless soup, I trust he will imitate my ex- 
emplary self-restraint, which is really too im- 
perfect as yet to be more than moderately 
exemplary. I do not expect him to repro- 
duce all my faults, for he has an intelligence 

59 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




of his own, and discriminates, but I do ex- 
pect him to discern and realize them. Many 
of them, with his mother's help, he has already 
been able to appreciate as faults, and I am 
glad to say that the more I fall into them, the 
more deplorable they seem to him, and the 
less inclined he is to adopt them. That pro- 
pensity which I have of being a little behind 
the stroke of the clock, of which all the family 
— under maternal tuition — have come into so 
vivid and constant an appreciation, is really 
likely to be a blessing to Jonas, for he is by 
nature inclined that way himself, and obser- 
vation of the ignominy and suffering that pro- 
crastination and dilatoriness bring upon me 
has strengthened a good deal in him the pur- 
pose to thwart his natural leaning towards 
these evils. So in the matter of the practice 
I follow occasionally of adding a suggestion 
of spirits to my water at dinner. I am not 
sure it is a commendable practice; neither is 
Jonas. He has a sensitive throat, and one of 
the finest natural gifts of abstemiousness I 
ever saw. I am somewhat less gifted in that 

60 




m. 



'^<i 






/AW * 






PARENTS 



particular than he, and he watches my pota- 
tions with mathematical attention, insisting, 
when I get more than two tablespoonfuls of 
whiskey at one sitting, that I am on the down- 
ward grade, and likely to come to grief. On 
the whole, it is probably more advantageous 
to Jonas that he should feel anxiety about my 
drinking habits than that I should be anxious 
about his. If I should set him an example 
by never drinking whiskey in his presence, I 
would deprive myself of the benefit of his val- 
uable warnings, and he would lose whatever 
advantage there is for him in observing how 
little spirits a man may consume without be- 
coming a teetotaler. What the parental ex- 
ample should be in this matter of drink is a 
good deal mooted. I trust my course may 
be blessed to Jonas, and if it isn't I shall be 
disappointed. At any rate, I am not sure that 
a course more didactically exemplary would 
be better, for some of the most deplorably 
thirsty persons I have ever grieved over have 
been the offspring of parents who were ag- 
gressively abstinent. 

61 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

One of the comforting experiences that 
come to parents when they see the blemishes 
in their own deportment cropping out in their 
children is the thought that their redeeming 
features may also be reproduced. Each of us 
must be conscious of tendencies in himself 
which, if they had full swing, would take him 
to the poor-house or worse, or at least bring 
him into disfavor with society. The reason 
they haven't wrecked us is that counter- ten- 
dencies and obstinate compunctions that 
would not be denied have existed along 
with them. My hopes for the future use- 
fulness of Jonas are largely based on the 
activity of his compunctions. He responds 
to appeal, and, if he is somewhat impatient 
of direction in matters of detail, he has 
fairly lucid ideas of his own about what 
it is expedient to accomplish, and how. 
The swift succession of his aspirations, and 
his propensity to be on with a new love be- 
fore he seems fully justified in abandoning 
the old, would cause me more misgiving if I 
could not hope it was based on a rather un- 

62 






PARENTS 

usual faculty for getting the available meat 
off most bones in exceptionally short time. 
If Jonas is to become a compendium of super- 
ficial and inaccurate knowledge — jack of all 
sciences, and master of none — it will truly be 
rather a sore fate, and he may never make as 
good a living as I hope he will. But, after all, he 
is growing up in a generation whose specialty 
promises to be the development of specialists, 
and perhaps a lad who reads a hundred dif- 
ferent books in a hundred days, and has fifty 
violent interests annually in as many forms 
of amusement, will be pinned down soon 
enough to a dominant occupation. If Jonas 
is discursive, he is also energetic and aspiring, 
and by no means content to be satisfied with 
second best if his powers of attainment can 
readily do better. After all, there are a lot 
of things in the world that are worth tasting, 
and of a good many of them a taste is enough. 
Moreover, it is by tasting and subsequent 
comparisons that the eventual preference 
which we call taste is developed. 

I hear it suggested in the family that Clem- 

63 




s?>> 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

entine has no natural manners; that the in- 
stincts of grace are not as ready in her as they 
might be; that her communications tend to 
brusqueness; that her salutations are some- 
what short and careless; and that when she 
condescends to blandishments they incline to 
be overwhelming. Nevertheless, there has 
never been any doubt in the family about the 
expediency of raising Clementine. She lives 
in a measure behind defences, but they are 
worth passing. If she is in any wise deficient 
in her courtesies to her own species, she makes 
up for it in lavishing attentions on dogs, cats, ' 
rabbits, squirrels, and horses. If she is some- 
what chary of letting her affections go out 
overmuch, I suspect it is the protecting in- 
stinct that guards a nature that does nothing 
by halves. No member of our family is so 
tenacious of her preferences as Clementine. 
None of us loves clothes so much, or has such 
positive notions of the fashion of them; none 
of us has more advanced opinions about trim- 
ming hats, or deeper convictions about dress- 
ing hair. Curls are satisfactory to Clemen- 

6 4 






PARENTS 

tine; braids are not. None of us is so obsti- 
nate in her detestations as she, or so candid 
in expressing them. Her likes and dislikes 
are serious matters. Just at this writing she 
is raising green shoots from an onion in a 
glass of water in the library window. It is a 
trial to the family. We all wish she were less 
attached to the onion, which is not hand- 
some nor sweet - smelling, but Clementine's 
griefs are too heart-rending and too impervi- 
ous to solace to be lightly incurred. It is 
quite well understood in the family by 
what inheritance she happened to be its 
most shy, erratic, helpful, and in some re- 
spects reliable member. She has in herself, 
more obviously than most of us, a warring 
community, whereof antagonistic members 
strive pretty constantly for the upperhand. 
But there is no tragedy about it, for she is 
equal to every conflict, even that which 
rages daily between her fatal gift of beauty 
and her contempt for soap. 

Children are unquestionably useful to par- 
ents. So, as a rule, are parents to children. 

65 





S& 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

To be sure, some babies are raised on bottles, 
colic notwithstanding, and some children cared 
for in institutions grow up to strength and 
usefulness. But persons who know most 
about institutions — even some of those who 
have the most to do with managing them — 
are agreed that it is distinctly to the advan- 
tage of children whose parents are at all tol- 
erable to worry along with them. The use 
of mothers, particularly in early life, is rather 
more obvious than that of fathers. Children 
must be fed, clothed, washed, scolded, kissed; 
manners must be taught them ; medicine must 
be put into, or kept out of, them; their health 
must be watched; they must be kept in or 
sent out judiciously, and presently their edu- 
cation must be seen to. The bulk of all this 
work falls on mothers. Fathers are consulted 
at times on such questions as what doctor or 
which school. In a good many families an 
appeal lies to the father in difficult cases of 
discipline. Fathers sympathize, advise, spoil, 
and provide, but it is remarkable how much 
a normal father, who has stood over the rais- 

66 





PARENTS 

ing of several children, can manage not to 
know about the details of it. He may be a 
fair judge of results, and really an important 
contributor to the happiness of his family, 
but, unless he happens to be a doctor, what is 
his opinion worth about foods and their qual- 
ities, times, and amounts, or about what 
weight of clothing a given child needs by day, 
and what by night ? Is the average father of 
any real use when a child is sick, except to 
amuse it, to encourage the mother, and to go 
on errands ? The primary duty of the father 
of a young family is to go out daily and get 
an adequate supply of money. When he at- 
tends faithfully and successfully to that, it is 
considered that he has done well, and great, 
verily, is his reward. The other details of 
management fall to the mother. 

Now mothering is a complicated matter, 
and to be good at it is a very pretty gift, and 
one not always as closely allied with other 
abilities as one might expect. Some good 
women are pretty bad mothers, and some 
women that are not nearly so exemplary are 

6 7 







.^r - 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

good ones. Some obtuse women are good at 
raising children, and some very clever women 
are no better at it than institutions. There 
seems to be a good deal of animal instinct and 
animal capacity about it ; and yet there is the 
same difference in various animals. I was 
never so much impressed with the difference 
in mothers as in viewing a collection of fam- 
ilies of pug-dogs. " Here's a good mother," 
said their owner. "She always raises most 
of her puppies. That one's a poor mother. 
Hers are apt to come to grief." They all 
looked alike to me; but some had this talent 
for taking care of puppies and inducing them 
to grow up, and others hadn't. So it is with 
women. Mother -sense is a subtle matter. 
Some women lack it who have the most ad- 
mirable theories about raising children, and 
the most outspoken views as to the errors 
and delinquencies of other mothers. There- 
fore, when you are looking for it, if you 
want to be particularly sagacious, look not at 
the mother, but at the children. The proof 
of the mothering lies in them; but even that 

68 






PARENTS 

is not infallible, for sometimes a good deputy 
does wonders. 

The apparent severity of some mothers has 
scandalized me a good deal. Their household 
laws are so Draconian, and the enforcement of 
them seems so relentless, that at times I am 
torn with sympathy for the children. But 
children seem to judge the maternal tree more 
by its fruit than its bark, and they have their 
compensations in kind. You usually find 
that the children of vociferous mothers talk 
back. The parental inwardness moves them 
more than the parental clamor. You may 
see soft - voiced women maintaining an easy 
but very effective discipline in their families 
by very gentle means. 

Fathers, too, have their uses in families, 
uses besides that of providing. They are not 
so indispensable as mothers, but even in cases 
where the wage-earning usefulness of the fa- 
ther is not of vital moment, getting along with- 
out a father seems no better than a making 
the best of things which are not as they ought 
to be. Under present conditions in this world 

6 9 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




we seem to need practising fathers up to the 
age of twenty-five or thirty, and consulting 
fathers for an indefinite space beyond that. 
It is remarkable over what a protracted pe- 
riod a proficient father who keeps himself in 
fairly good order can continue to be useful 
=^fjk> and generally popular in a family. Fathers 
who are unduly modest and disposed to under- 
estimate their domestic value may often draw 
conclusions flattering to themselves from what 
they observe of the experience of fatherless 
families, and especially of fatherless boys. In- 
deed, it is universally admitted that there are 
not enough competent fathers to go around, 
and there are few that are competent, or seem 
so, on whom outside jobs of fathering are not 
pressed. Undoubtedly it is the duty of every 
father to do what he can to supplement the 
school-masters, doctors, ministers, and others 
on whom the protection and guidance of the 
fatherless devolve. 

There is solace and reassurance for all par- 
ents in the thought of the large charity of 
children, and the allowances they make for 

70 






PARENTS 

their parents' errors. Walking a chalk -line 
and posturing as a model of conduct is not 
easy even for a grown-up person. Parents 
who entertain the theory that it is their prov- 
ince always to appear to their children the 
embodiment of abstract right, cut out hard 
lines for themselves, and entertain ambitions 
doubtful in value, and still more doubtful of 
realization. Being godlike is a condition that 
doubtless has its justifications, but being tin- 
god-like yields neither sport nor emoluments. 
Much safer is the state of the erring parent 
who tries to shape his conduct so that it will 
bear reasonable scrutiny as it really is, and 
trusts to his children's love to make them 
tolerant of his defects. After all, love is the 
most indispensable element in the relation be- 
tween parent and child. It is lucky it is so 
common, for raising families without it is hard 
work and ill done. The great detail in which 
parents most excel institutions in bringing up 
children is that they love them more. 

7i 






STRONG POINTS OF INFANCY 




The distinction of the human infant lies in 
his incapacity. So say our brethren learned 
in science, assuring us that man's strongest 
points are his excessive helplessness when he 
is a new baby, and the preposterous length 
of time it takes him to grow up. Mr. A. F. 
Chamberlain, who has written a book about 
The Child, gives a crowd of authorities for 
these assertions, and makes the reasons of 
them so plain that any of us can see for him- 
self that they may be true. We know that 
"man begins life at the very bottom of the 
ladder, and crawls to maturity at a slower 
pace by far than any of the animal species." 
Instead of being like a colt, grown up at four 
and used up at twenty, he is barely grown 
up at twenty, but is good then for forty or 

72 





STRONG POINTS OF INFANCY 

fifty years of service. It was John Fiske who 
pointed out that the protracted helplessness 
of children kept parents together for longer 
and longer periods in successive epochs, and 
led at last to permanent family relations. The 
human race would have perished, Rousseau 
declared, if man had not begun by being a 
child. "Easy come, easy go," seems to be a 
rule of biological development as well as of 
pecuniary enlargement. It was a scientific 
mistake to represent Minerva as springing 
complete from the head of Jove. It would 
have accorded better with human experience 
to make her perfection the fruit of an extra- 
long childhood. Whoever is impatient of 
childhood, of its helplessness at first, its long 
duration, the slow development of strength, 
judgment, and responsibility, let him ponder 
these matters and come to a better point of 
view. Childhood is an enormous expense to 
humanity, but not one minute of it, if we take 
the large view, is wasted. The expenditure 
on account of it is money invested, not squan- 
dered; time and pains put out at interest for 

73 








THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




the future maintenance of humanity. Which 
are the strong nations of earth? Invariably 
those whose sons and daughters come slowest 
to maturity, and are best carried through the 
longest periods of infancy, childhood, and 
youth. 

Not but that precocity is excusable in in- 
dividuals. In the development of a race 
heredity will play many tricks, now and then 
putting an old head on young shoulders, and 
equipping some children with faculties so un- 
usual that some of them must ripen early to 
make way for the development of the rest. 
By all means bring along the precocious chil- 
dren as rapidly as prudence permits, for no 
rule holds in all individual cases, and there is 
no certainty that the light that burns bright- 
est at the start may not endure radiant to an 
end duly remote. But be thankful that all 
children are not precocious, for in races the 
rule holds, and quick development means a 
shallow soil, an early crop, and then sterility. 

So childhood is not man's disability, but 
his opportunity, glorious and unmatched in 

74 







BREAKFAST 




STRONG POINTS OF INFANCY 

all creation. It is that that we need to realize 
and act upon. The biologists tell us that men 
are never so much like monkeys or monkeys 
so much like men as at the very beginnings of 
their respective lives. They trace all sorts of 
queer analogies between our babies and infant 
monkeys. One investigator, Dr. Louis Rob- 
inson, has remarked that brand-new human 
babies have a capacity for holding on with 
their hands which is out of all proportion to 
their strength in all other ways. Infants an 
hour old, it seems, can grasp a stick and sup- 
port their weight by their arms for a quarter 
of a minute, and at two weeks old they can 
hang on in that fashion for about two minutes. 
That implies prodigious strength in the arms 
and fingers, considering the extreme helpless- 
ness in other directions of the creature who 
can't hold up its head or do anything with its 
legs. They tell us that this infantile capac- 
ity for hanging on has come down from a 
time when we were still monkeys and lived in 
trees. Then, babies that couldn't hang on 
for dear life to their mothers' hair, or a limb, 

75 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




or anything clutchable, got an early fall, and 
never grew up. Those that did grow up 
handed down to their descendants this capac- 
ity for taking hold early and hard, and our 
babies still have the habit, though it is a long 
time now since human families have been 
raised in these parts in anything more tree- 
like than a tenement-house fire-escape. The 
scientists spin other tales about babies that 
are interesting, though possibly libellous. 
They insist that their heads at birth are shaped 
very like the heads of young monkeys, and 
that some of them show signs of a half-hearted 
and abortive early disposition towards tails. 
They hold, too, that the delight of a young in- 
fant to splash in a tub is the distant echo of a 
remote time when we were members of the 
alligator family, and took kindly to water at 
the earliest possible age. They say that the 
reason babies can't stand on their legs at first, 
and make such a protracted labor of learning 
to walk, is that standing erect and walking 
on the hind-legs is a latter-day accomplish- 
ment, and that if we took after our forebears 

7 6 



cMP^ 



\<?. 










STRONG POINTS OF INFANCY 

and walked naturally, we would still go on 
all-fours. 

The upshot of all these imputations and 
deductions is that babies are very like little 
monkeys, and that we are least human when 
we are youngest. But by way of solace, and 
to save our self-conceit if that has suffered, 
they assure us that whereas the little monkeys 
grow less and less like humans every hour 
they grow, our babies turn their backs on 
the monkey type at the first squirm, and 
grow away from it hand over fist during the 
whole of their protracted period of develop- 
ment. The monkey child's strength runs 
to jaw and to length of limb, and to agility 
and monkey ways. The human child's nose 
asserts itself, his brain grows and grows, and 
insists on having room to expand in, and his 
skull takes shape accordingly. He finds his 
legs, and gradually puts them to use, though 
in some children strength comes to the legs 
very slowly. The learned doctors assure us, 
too, that the period of upward development 
in which the child grows more human all the 

77 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

time, and keeps putting distance between him- 
self and the monkeys, is in infancy and early 
youth, and that presently upward evolution 
stops, and development becomes "an adap- 
tation to the environment without regard to 
upward zoological movement." 

The deduction from all these learned reve- 
lations seems to be: Take care of the child, 
and the man will take care of himself. So 
long as the period continues which is most 
favorable to progress away from the monkey 
type, keep the infant on the run. Get all the 
monkey out of him you can. As to his body, 
encourage Nature in her disposition to work 
out the baby's human possibilities, by keep- 
ing him well. As to his mind, humanize it 
in every way you can. And take especial 
pains with the girl babies. They are the ones, 
Mr. Chamberlain says, that count the most. 
The child and the woman, we are assured, 
are the transmitters of evolution for the 
race. The woman, more childlike than man, 
is more important than he to future gen- 
erations, though man unquestionably has 

78 






STRONG POINTS OF INFANCY 

his uses and his value in the immediate^ 
present. 

The practical advantage of this theory of 
monkey ancestry is that it helps us to realize 
what children have to get over, gives us in- 
creased patience with them, and especially 
with boys, and supports our confidence in the 
final triumph of the human traits even when 
they seem to lag. The drawbacks to it are 
that it flouts our self-conceit, and that it 
seems to abbreviate too much the evolution- 
ary possibilities of each individual. It is 
grievous to be assured that we make our fast- 
est progress away from monkeydom before 
we are born and in earliest infancy, and that 
our upward course is soon checked by the 
need of adapting ourselves to our environ- 
ment. Never mind. Those theories apply 
more to the bones and the body than to the 
spirit and the mind. It is the weak point of 
the inferior races that their mental develop- 
ment stops very early, but very intelligent 
persons believe that in the best individuals 
of the best races it never stops at all. Their 

79 




s&>< 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

view seems to be that compelling necessities 
of environment may and do check mental 
growth, as they are said to check physical 
evolution, but that if the environment is fa- 
vorable enough, mental growth need not be 
halted. There was discussion of this matter 
recently between President G. Stanley Hall, 
of Clark University, and President Eliot. Dr. 
Hall held to the idea that there were stated 
periods in life during which, but hardly after- 
wards, certain kinds of knowledge could be 
assimilated to advantage. The season of de- 
velopment was soon past, he thought, and the 
time for organization succeeded it. But Dr. 
Eliot maintained that though men's powers 
are diminished by age, life is a progress, a 
growth, an expansion from beginning to end. 
Growth in most men is stopped, he thought, 
not by natural retrogression, but by the need 
of making a living. 

There is solace for ambitious spirits in Dr. 
Eliot's opinions; and as for persons who don't 
want monkeys or monkey traits in the family, 
they are welcome to share the attitude of a 

80 



t ~ - 






STRONG POINTS OF INFANCY 

young person named Clementine, who says 
there is no warrant for the monkey proposi- 
tion in Genesis, nor yet in Exodus, but explicit 
information in both those depositories to the 
contrary. 





S& 





NAUGHTINESS 

Naughtiness in a child is a relative quan- 
tity and depends upon circumstances. Pretty 
much everything that concerns morals or 
ethics is relative. The first rule of conduct 
is, Do as you like. Any sort of conduct will 
pass uncriticised where there are no critics, 
but where there is society there must always 
be critics, and the first rule of conduct has 
had to be amended, for otherwise people could 
not live comfortably together. The process of 
amendment, which has been going on since 
the earliest times, is considered, in Christian 
countries, to have reached perfection in the 
golden rule. Theoretically, naughtiness in 
a child is deviation from the golden rule. 
Practically, it is deviation from the standard 
of conduct which the child's parents or elders 
consider proper for children. 

82 





NAUGHTINESS 

Now, parents and elders have all sorts of 
standards of conduct for children, and it very 
often happens that the standards of the two 
parents of a child are not in entire accord. 
Again, parents are subject to contraptions of 
temper and disorders of health, and often 
tolerate on one day conduct which they find 
reprehensible on the day following. Accord- 
ingly, naughtiness in a child consists, practi- 
cally, in deviations from several imperfect and 
variable standards. This will seem discour- 
aging if we do not consider that the natural, 
normal state of us all is a state of naughti- 
ness, ameliorated by constant striving to be 
more nearly good. 

In the case of most children there are 
things which the father considers naughty 
and the mother tolerates, and other things 
that the mother considers naughty and the 
father tolerates. The father and mother, if 
they are reasonably wise people, try to back 
each other up in reprehensions, and so to 
blend their standards that the child may 
find its course reasonably clear. But the best 

83 







jeZf 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

they can do is apt to fall somewhat short of 
perfection. Happily, a child gets a great 
deal of training out of the atmosphere in 
which he lives. He learns language by hear- 
ing it spoken, and if what he hears is good 
language he learns to speak good language. 
If he grows up where good manners prevail, 
his manners will be apt to be good. The 
standard of conduct that is really effective in 
shaping the child's character is the standard 
that governs the people who govern him. 
Precepts may be ever so good, injunction ever 
so searching, but daily example is more effect- 
ual than either. 

But as to naughtiness. It is a deviation, 
then, from the parents' or teachers' stand- 
ards. And as infants are not born with stand- 
ards of conduct ready made, ordinary naugh- 
tiness is a natural incident of training. The 
child is not born obedient. Teaching him the 
necessary measure of obedience is a gradual, 
experimental process, punctuated by devia- 
tions into disobedience, which are naughty. A 
child is not born truthful. On the contrary, 

8 4 









NAUGHTINESS 

it is born weak, and deceit is the natural ref- 
uge of the weak. The training of the child 
in veracity is a process which may be ex- ^| 
pected to yield some lies, and lies are cer- 
tainly naughty Some children get by birth 
much more politeness than other children do. 
Manners and courtesy seem to come natural 
to some children, and are attained with diffi- 
culty, if at all, by others. The training of 
children in manners will, of course, result in 
the precipitation of , much naughtiness, but 
that is all in the day's work, and is not a 
thing for parents to lose sleep over. Even 
when brothers or sisters in a family squabble, 
and are very slow in using one with another 
those graces of consideration and forbearance 
which are so necessary to harmonious living 
— even that should not make the solicitous 
parent despair. Man by nature is a conten- 
tious beast. He is born into a world in which 
even now many problems have to be settled 
by blows, and in which disputes never cease. 
To teach him gentleness is an exploit, and es- 
pecially to teach him gentleness to his equals 

85 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




or to persons smaller than himself, whom he 
does not fear. It is naughty for children to 
quarrel, but that is a form of naughtiness the 
immediate eradication of which is not to be 
expected, and in which it is enough if steady 
progress is made towards amiability and self- 
control. 

The modern doctors, it seems, distinguish 
between two kinds of wrong-doing in children. | 
Mere naughtiness which is a natural incident ir£ 
of training, they make little of, but there is i/ ; h'r\} 
an abnormal naughtiness that gives them deep 'sffrSji 
concern. The normally naughty child re- 
sponds to training, punishment, and restraint, 
and acquires self-control and good behavior, 
so that as he grows older he comes truly to 
years of discretion. His mind accepts the 
lessons that are offered it, and his conduct 
shapes itself accordingly. But the abnor- 
mally naughty child does not profit by expe- 
rience. He does not learn that certain lines 
of conduct are inexpedient and avoid them. 
He avoids them only so long as the effects of 
punishment are vividly remembered or he is 

86 





NAUGHTINESS 

under effectual restraint, and when the press- 
ure of restraint relaxes, back he falls into 
evil-doing. The naughty child of this abnor- 
mal type is in danger of growing up to be 
a criminal. The trouble with him is that he 
is morally defective. He may be first rate 
physically, and of excellent mental ability, 
but a moral imbecile. 

In some of these abnormally naughty chil- 
dren the congenital, moral defect becomes 
obvious very early in life. In others it only 
shows when the restraints of childhood have 
been outgrown and the will gets freer play. 
The astonishingly bad boys that one reads 
about now and then in the newspapers — the 
Van Wormser boys, who were lately executed 
for murder in New York State, or the Chicago 
boy bandits, whose capture a few months 
since was attended by so many deaths — may 
have been of this moral - imbecile type, or 
they may have been mere normally naughty 
boys whose ruin came from neglected moral 
training. For though there are children who 
have by birth so blessed an inheritance of 

87 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

virtuous inclination that they can't go very- 
wrong, and though there are other rare chil- 
dren who are cursed by congenital perversity 
that can only be very imperfectly rectified by 
training, the great majority of children seem 
to be made or marred in the raising. 

In London the problem of the abnormally 
naughty children, the "moral deficients," is 
being discussed by school boards, magistrates, 
physicians, and others who have special re- 
sponsibilities about the future of the rising 
generation. It seems obvious that the "de- 
ficients" should be separated from their fel- 
lows, but no practical means of doing it has 
yet been hit upon. In New York the care of 
children who are naughty enough to fall afoul 
of the law devolves upon the Children's Court, 
which deals with them according to the dictates 
of a large experience. One expedient which 
it has lately found useful is to turn the erring 
children over to its chief probation officer. 
He takes counsel with them, tries to impress 
upon them the inexpediency of wrong-doing, 
and lets most of them go on probation under 

88 






NAUGHTINESS 

suspension of sentence. But while on proba- 
tion they have to report to him at regular in- 
tervals. This, as will be seen, is an effort to 
teach good conduct to children who are only 
normally naughty and are capable of being 
trained to follow better courses. Mr. Jenkins, 
the chief probation officer, says it works pretty 
well. A suspended sentence hanging over a 
wayward boy makes an impression on his 
mind, and usually he makes a decided and 
successful effort to amend his ways and keep 
out of the reformatory. 

Of all the child problems there is none quite 
so difficult as the problem of the child who 
seems to have ample sense to learn every- 
thing that is necessary except to be good . The 
mental imbecile can be cared for — the State 
will do it if the parents can't. The child 
who is helpless from deformity or physical 
misfortune can be provided for. But for the 
child who is not insane, and who never- 
theless shows imperfect moral responsibility, 
there seems to be no safe place. Take a 
boy who seems to have good enough brains, 

8 9 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




so that he can be educated, and who is 
physically strong, but is found to lack the 
power to resist temptation. He may be 
amiable and agreeable; he may be industri- 
ous; he may be sincerely well intentioned. 
Pie may do well for a time, but invariably 
after a while break down and lose moral 
responsibility, taking to drink, running in 
debt, following any course of dissipation or 
extravagance that may be open to him. Such 
children are born, not very infrequently, in 
all conditions of life. Doubtless they have 
some congenital defect that is fatal to their 
orderly development. They are not insane, 
and so not fit to be shut up ; they are imper- 
fectly responsible, and so not really fit to go 
at large. But at large they must go, for or- 
dinarily there is no other course to follow 
with them; to help them to rise is only to 
insure a harder fall when they fall. They are 
pathetic creatures, foredoomed, some of them, 
to a thousand efforts and a thousand fail- 
ures, a grief to those who care for them, 
a sorrow to themselves, and never safe 

90 





NAUGHTINESS 

from disaster until their bones go back to 
earth. 

Fortunately the doctrine of the survival of 
the fittest comes to aid society in dealing with 
these unfortunates, for usually hardships and 
excesses and an irregular life wear them out 
prematurely. There are tramps who seem to 
find a nomadic life fairly wholesome and to 
grow fat on casual scraps of food and plenty 
of sleep out-doors or in hay-mows. There are 
other mature examples of incorrigible naugh- 
tiness who seem to illustrate the preservative 
qualities of alcohol. They reek usually of 
rum, and nothing limits their consumption of 
stimulants except total pecuniary prostration. 
And yet they live on and on, and year after 
year the observer who happens to live on the 
line of their annual progress will wonder to 
see them still alive. It is extraordinary how 
long the human frame will sometimes endure 
the most inconsiderate treatment; but still 
the rule, with due exceptions, is that grown- 
ups in whom naughtiness abounds abnormal- 
ly do not nearly live their time out. 

9i 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




But adult incorrigibles and moral deficients 
make too sad a topic. To get back to com- 
mon naughtiness and its treatment. Do you 
believe in strict discipline or mild ? Some 
one was telling the other day about how 
Flint, the eminent captain of industry, brought 
up his family. He is a remarkable man, who 
has made a huge fortune and is the master- 
mind in enterprises of enormous scope and im- 
portance. He is strong in aggression, strong 
in defence. He has constantly to decide ques- 
tions of great importance affecting thousands 
of people. He is a general in the great in- 
dustrial struggle which is so important a part 
of modern life, and of course he is a very busy 
man. What Flint says goes in his vast busi- 
ness, and he cannot afford to say it but once. 
Strange to say, he has a large family, and they 
tell me he is very much the same sort of man 
at home that he is in his office. He believes 
in system — of course he has to have system 
in his business — and he is very systematic at 
home. Things must be done, and they must 
be done on the stroke of the clock. If Eliza- 





\ 



w 



NAUGHTINESS 

beth isn't down to breakfast at so many 
minutes past seven, when she does come 
she is not unlikely to be sent back to bed. 
If Jack fails to make schedule time, ac- 
cording to the paternal schedule, Jack's fa- 
ther takes notice and the notice is apt to be 
peremptory. They say Flint's children are 
all afraid of him. That may be true, and yet 
they may be getting very useful training 
which will give good results. The results will 
depend on the material in the children, and 
also upon how much sense Flint possesses, 
how much he loves his children, and whether 
he has the time and the discernment to adapt 
his methods to their individual requirements. 
Rules are good in a family — so is system ; but 
you can't raise a family altogether by rule. 
You can raise turnips that way, but not chil- 
dren. These tick-of- the- watch, my-word-is- 
law men, like Flint, who are used to being 
obeyed, are always in danger of becoming des- 
pots and spoiling their work in their families 
by over-restriction of their children's liberty 
of independent thought and action. Disobe- 

93 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

dience is naughtiness. Obedience is a first- 
rate thing; but the purpose of making chil- 
dren promptly obedient is to drill them in 
good conduct so that they will prefer good 
conduct when they grow up. Good habits 
are a most valuable endowment, but hardly 
so good as the will to do right, and it is pos- 
sible to impart the habits by a training so 
rigid that it stunts the will and cramps the 
mind's development. 

I am not sure that Flint is doing the best 
for his children that is possible, but, anyhow, 
he is not neglecting them, and I suspect he 
is doing the best he knows how. Discipline 
that is somewhat too strict is far better than 
neglect. I knew a coachman once, named 
James. He was a superior man and an ex- 
cellent disciplinarian with high standards. 
You could hear his horses coming from clear 
down the street or around the corner, and 
you knew they were his by their hoof-beats, 
because he insisted that they should travel 
exactly together and keep a steady gait. It 
is delightful to see anything done well, and it 

94 






NAUGHTINESS 

was delightful to see James drive horses. He* 
had nerves, and was not of exceptionally 
sweet temper, and sometimes when a green 
or contumacious horse tried his temper over- 
much James would lick him. But he was an 
excellent horseman, and kept his beasts in 
excellent condition, and made his helpers do 
their work, and did his own work thoroughly. 
He had a number of children, who lived in 
his house in the back yard near the stable, 
and he trained those children very much as 
he did his horses. A strap always hung by 
the kitchen mantel-piece, and when the chil- 
dren's conduct fell short of James's standard 
they got the strap. They were all afraid of 
him, but they all grew up good and did 
well and were devoted to their father. I 
hope Flint's children will turn out just as 
well. James and Flint have a good deal 
in common — energy, industry, and a resolute 
purpose to make things go right. James 
didn't rule entirely by the strap, though 
the strap came handy for the discourage- 
ment of naughtiness; and I don't suppose 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

Flint rules entirely by system, though sys- 
tem is essential to a man who has a lot 
to do. 

Yet there are many parents who raise fami- 
lies, and raise them very well, without any 
very rigid system and without keeping a strap 
within easy reach. They make companions 
of their children, and though they have a 
standard of conduct and make their children 
come up to it, they contrive that the desire 
to please shall be the compelling motive in 
their families rather than the fear of the pa- 
rental law. I suppose that is the more modern } 
method of training. We seem to be, on the 
average, more gentle and rather more indul- 
gent with our children than our grandparents 
were, and more solicitous to develop their 
own individuality than to impress our own 
individuality upon them. No doubt our mod- 
ern way is a good way in good hands, but 
there must be force of character, however 
gentle, behind it, if it is to produce good re- 
sults. The business of raising children doesn't 
take care of itself. It has, ordinarily, to be 

9 6 





NAUGHTINESS 

attended to thoroughly, if it is going to be 
successful. There has got to be backbone 
and intelligence in a family somewhere if 
naughtiness is not to prevail. 




^ 






GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

There is nothing the matter with girls. 
No large, general mistake or miscalculation 
has been made about them. They are a good 
invention of the kind, and the kind is indis- 
pensable and has never been beaten. If you 
don't think so, there is something the matter 
with you. When a race or a nation doesn't 
think so, it is an infallible symptom that there 
is something amiss with that nation. There 
isn't any surer test of the progress of any peo- 
ple in civilization than its appreciation of girls. 
We all concede that nowadays, holding that 
countries in which girl babies are used to be 
drowned, when an apparent surplus of them 
happens, are behind the times and fit to be 
derisively regarded. We notice that the peo- 
ple of such countries cannot hold their own 

9 8 





GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

in the great world competition, and that peo- 
ple who have sounder views on this one sub- 
ject find no great difficulty in whipping them 
in war. The Chinese, who are somewhat 
backward in this matter, cannot somehow 
seem to fight successfully, and the India people 
and most of the Oriental nations seem to be 
handicapped by the same perverse attitude 
towards the feminine half of humanity. They 
never will get on in the world until they come 
to have sounder views about girls, for to dis- 
parage girls is as futile as to disparage the 
law of gravitation or any other great cosmic 
truth that we have got to live by, whether we 
recognize it or not. It is the exercise of the 
human will that makes things go ahead on 
this earth, and when you disparage women, 
and balk their reasonable aspirations, and 
leave them with their minds ill trained and 
imperfectly developed, you waste, by mis- 
directing it, an enormous amount of will pow- 
er that ought to be working harmoniously for 
the betterment of everything. 

I do not notice any indisposition to raise 

99 



L.ofC. 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

the girls that are born into American families, 
nor even any clear preference for boys. Both 
kinds are wanted. Families that have already 
been blessed with a reasonable provision of 
girls grieve sometimes, to be sure, when a new- 
comer also is a girl, but that is natural, and 
implies no undervaluation of girls, for when 
a family happens to be all boys there is quite 
as much disappointment when a new-comer 
turns out to be another boy. The Oriental 
tradition which glorifies with such particular 
fervency the mothers of sons comes very ad- 
vantageously to our notice in the Bible, but 
it does not take much of a hold on us. We 
want both kinds, and we tend more and more 
to give to both the same kind and the same 
amount of general education. How much 
wisdom there is in giving girls and boys the 
same kind of education is still disputable, for 
the higher education of girls is a comparatively 
new thing and still in the experimental stage. 
Some of the wisest people who are engaged in 
it are quite ready to admit that they don't 
fully know what they are about, and that it 

ioo 






GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

is possible that some of the tasks they set the 
girlish mind to accomplish are not those that 
eventual experience will select. / 

Indeed, all education seems to be still an 
experiment : new theories are constantly being 
put on trial ; old methods are constantly being 
swapped for new, and almost as constantly 
the new methods stir misgivings in the minds 
of some of the observers. Even the kinder- 
garten is not yet above criticism. Able and 
amusing writers have poked a good deal of 
rather penetrating fun at it in the magazines, 
and though as an institution it is well founded 
and sure to last and to do good, the usefulness 
of kindergarten methods is felt to have bounds. 
The aspiration to make education so easy and 
so pleasant that it will be no trouble to any 
one is not universally applauded just now, 
and when critics and commentators declare 
that effort has great educational value, and 
that children ought to learn to overcome dif- 
ficulties, the advocates of the primrose path 
have to do a good deal of explaining. We 
know in a general way that small children are 

IOI 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 





being taught to read and write, that some of 
them are learning to spell, that they learn 
arithmetic, geography, and abhorrence of liq- 
uor on physiological grounds, and other use- 
ful branches. Whether they are taught this 
year to read a whole word at a time, or by 
syllables, we don't know. We hope it doesn't 
matter, for whatever method prevails just 
now seems likely to be found defective before 
the year after next. At a conference of teach- 
ers the master of a famous school for girls U'i^-"^ 
said that fashions in the education of girls 
change so fast that one method hardly endures 
long enough to educate a single pupil. " But 
we find." he added, " that this variability does 
not harm them. ' ' It may have been this same 
wise teacher, conscious of the limitations of 
his craft, who said that when he and his staff 
had brought their girls together and warmed 
and aired the rooms, about four-fifths of what 
was possible had been done. He spoke, of 
course, with more humor than accuracy, but 
a great deal has been done when a good lot 
of pupils have been assembled in a suitable 



102 






IN SCHOOL 




GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

and healthy place and put to work, with good 
people to look after them. With that much 
of a start, they will do a great deal for them- 
selves and for one another. We expect them 
to do a great deal to educate one another. 
Whether the pupils are girls or boys, their ri- 
valries, their friendships, all their dealings with 
one another are educational, and help in that 
formation of character and ideals which is 
the most important aim of education. 

So much is printed about mistaken methods 
and wrong teaching — -the progressive teachers 
are so scandalized by the way things used to 
be done, and the conservatives are so mis- 
trustful of the efficiency of the way things are 
done, that the observing parent has excuse 
enough to despair of finding anywhere any- 
thing more than a second-best educational op- 
portunity for his children. Like enough that 
is all he will find, but he must comfort himself 
by reasoning that a second-best chance is all a 
first-rate child needs, and all a second-rate 
child can improve. There must be an anal- 
ogy between the science of education and the 

103 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

science of cure. What saves all the quacks 
and patent-medicine men and empirical heal- 
ers, and keeps their advertisements in the pa- 
pers, is that a very large proportion of the sick 
people get more or less well, whether they get 
professional assistance or not. No doubt a 
good many of the educational strategies that 
are tested owe such durability as they attain 
to the fact that an average child who goes to 
school will manage to get more or less educa- 
tion, whether the processes in use are rather 
better or rather worse than the average. 
Moreover, people who went to school in times 
past and managed to learn enough to keep 
afloat in the sea of life are apt to think that 
the kind of schooling they had was the right 
kind. If they don't think so, but in their ob- 
jections show themselves instructed and capa- 
ble, observers may reason that the kind of 
bad schooling that was compatible with much 
good mental fruits must have had good faults. 
It is rather a vague business, this directing 
of the young idea. The little ships have a 
pretty wide channel ahead, with deep water 

104 





<f^ 



;*g* 




GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

from shore to shore, and the folks who want 
to mark this course or that with buoys as the 
only safe one may be taking more pains than 
the facts warrant. There is a school-master in 
New York who can talk, on compulsion, about 
the education of girls, but some of his parent 
customers complain that he talks indefinitely, 
and that they know no more after hearing him 
than before. They pay him a compliment. 
The subject is large and vague, and he realizes 
it. Nobody talks other than vaguely about 
a large, vague subject, except persons who do 
not realize how large and vague the subject is. 
One of the special difficulties in educating 
girls is that the ultimate use of girls' educa- 
tion is as yet much less clearly ascertained 
than the ultimate use of education for boys. 
The education of boys is directed in over- 
whelming measure towards qualifying them 
to make a living. We try to develop in them 
the capacity to do something well enough to 
insure their being paid for doing it, and we 
want the thing they are to do to be the best 
thing of which they are capable. If we start 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




out to make a lawyer of a boy, we begin by 
giving him general education on the lines that 
experience has indicated to be best adapted 
for the purpose. When he knows his three 
R's, and can bound Kamchatka and spell 
"separate," and tell who won at Bunker Hill 
and who at Gettysburg, we teach him Latin, 
and then Greek, invite him to pasture in the 
fields of mathematics, philosophy, science, 
literature, and any of the abutting fields that 
attract him, and finally, when his mental 
powers have had a chance to be developed, 
we teach him all we can about law. Having 
tried to teach the boy to think, and to give him 
the necessary facts, words, and images to think 
with, we give him a particular subject to think 
about, and turn him loose to think for himself. 
We begin with a girl just as we do with a 
boy — teach her the elements of contempora- 
neous knowledge, and then go on and try to 
develop her ability to think. To that end 
we use, as yet, very much the same processes 
that we use for boys, not because we are sure 
that they are the best ones for girls, but be- 

106 








GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

cause they are the ones we know best. But 
when it comes to giving girls a particular 
thing to think about, we are apt to pause. It 
is comparatively plain sailing for a boy. When 
he has learned the rudiments of his trade he 
gets a job and proceeds to perfect himself, if 
he can, by practice. But what sort of a job 
do we want for our girl ? We have entire con- 
fidence that there is a place for her in the world, 
and we have tried to qualify her to fill it with 
grace and efficiency, but we don't know cer- 
tainly either where it is or what it is. A vast 
number of grown-up girls earn money in these 
days, but still the education of girls is not 
nearly so generally directed towards making 
successful wage-earners as the education of 
boys is. Money wages is a very imperfect 
measure of usefulness, but, looking about us, 
we see that a very large majority of the use- 
ful men are paid for being useful, and that 
their pay bears some relation to their useful- 
ness. The surest way to train our boys to 
make a living is to train them to be useful, 
and the surest way to train them to be useful 

107 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




seems to be to train them to make a living. 
We seldom have any fear that a boy is too 
valuable to spend his time making a living, 
for his best development is likely to lie in that 
direction. But with girls it is a different 
story. Looking about in the world, we see 
hundreds of thousands of women earning their 
living, doing useful work and drawing wages. 
They and their labors could very ill be spared ; 
but, after all, earning wages is not the indis- 
pensable office of women in the world. The 
indispensable women have scant time to earn 
wages. They are too busy, and their work is 
too important. They are keeping house and 
raising families. We could make shift to rub 
along somehow if all the wage-earning women 
in the world quit work, but if the women who 
are making homes and bringing up children re- 
tired from their business, the shop would close. 
And there comes in the special complica- 
tion that affects the education of girls. When 
you have a fine girl with a good mind, who 
can learn anything in reason, and be trained to 
almost any sort of useful labor, after her edu- 

108 

J 





BWHaa»»»» J l 





GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

cation has come to the point where special- 
ization might begin, you have to face the pos- 
sibility that by going on and giving her a 
special thing to think about and work at, 
you may be aiding to divert her from a wom- 
an's greatest career to one, notable it may be, 
but less satisfying and of less importance. 
The risk — the apparent risk — is not that a 
girl may know too much to marry, but that 
during the years when marriage is best, and 
easiest, achieved she may be so busy with 
other concerns as to miss meeting the man 
whom she ought to marry. For while it may 
be confidently asserted that no mere intel- 
lectual preoccupation is going to hinder a girl 
from marrying the man whom she recognizes 
to be the right man if he comes along at the 
right time and suggests it to her, it is possible 
that she may be too much preoccupied to 
recognize him when he comes, and also that 
her work may remove her from the social ^-U*& 
point she would naturally occupy, and cause \/kjF(t 
her to miss meeting him altogether. 

So, on the whole, while there is pretty gen- 

109 




*v-- 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

eral agreement that a boy is likely to find the 
best development of which he is capable by 
coming reasonably early to a wage - earning 
task and sticking reasonably close to it, there 
is by no means the same confidence that that 
is the best thing for a girl, since we feel that 
her highest development and greatest useful- 
ness are likely to come with marriage, and 
that pursuits that prejudice the chances of 
her marrying are on that account the less de- 
sirable' for her. And since marriage and wage- 
earning are imperfectly compatible occupa- 
tions, we should not choose to educate her 
primarily to be a wage-earner, but primarily 
to be a wife, and incidentally to earn wages 
if she must and while she must. 

Now the occupation of being a wife, includ- 
ing presumptively, as it does, the occupation 
of being a mother, is one of extremely com- 
prehensive scope. Some women who seem 
not to have had very much education do very 
well at it, and some women who have been 
profusely educated make pretty bad work of 
it. It is a calling in which health goes for 

no 






GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

more than accomplishments, that phase of 
wisdom which we call "gumption" for more 
than learning, instinct for much, and char- 
acter for most of all. But you cannot over- 
educate a girl for the occupation of being a 
wife. You may keep her too long at her 
books and out of what we call ' ' society ' ' ; 
you may teach her to value unduly things of 
minor importance; you may misdirect and 
miseducate her in various ways ; but you can't 
educate her to think so wisely on so many 
subjects that she will be above that business. 
Nobody is really so superior as to be too good 
to marry. Plenty of women are too good to 
marry this or that or the other individual 
man ; too many women, perhaps, in these days, 
are educated beyond the point of being satis- 
fied with any man who is likely to want to 
marry them, but the woman who seems 




. . . too good 
For human nature's daily food 



hasn't been overeducated. The trouble with 
her is that she doesn't know enough. She is 



in 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

not overdeveloped, but stunted. Education 
is the development of ability, and a wife — 
and, even more, a mother — can't have her 
abilities too much developed. Her place is a 
seat of power, and all the knowledge that she 
can command will find a field for its employ- 
ment. 

Blandina tells me she is going to college. 
There seems to be no doubt about it in her 
mind, and therefore there is very little doubt 
about it in mine. Her mother has no very 
fervent liking for girls' colleges. She has old- 
fashioned views in that particular. Clemen- 1 
tine is of her mother's mind. I don't know 
what Clementine intends to do with herself 
when she finishes her course in Miss Perkins's 
school. She is a fair scholar and can acquire 
book learning when she tries, but is only mod- 
erately disposed to try. Her lively interest 
in life and its concerns hesitates to be over- 
much concentrated on lesson-books. I am sure 
she will learn as much as is necessary, though 
perhaps not all that is desirable, and when 
she gets out of school, at nineteen or there- 

112 






GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

abouts, I hope, I am sure, that her education 
will not stop. Judging from present indica- 
tions, she will be able to think to some pur- 
pose at that age, and will be a pretty close 
and accurate observer of current events and 
an animated commentator thereon. I hope 
she will see things and meet people worth 
talking about, for I look forward to being con- 
siderably edified by her discourse on people 
and affairs in general during the years when 
Blandina is still in pursuit of all the book^ 
learning there is. I think Clementine is go- " == 
ing to develop ability to cook and to hire 
cooks, and I shall be disappointed if she can- 
not, and does not, learn to trim hats and com- 
pose raiment. Perhaps she may even come 
in time to do her hair properly and to be 
adequately solicitous about shoe-buttons and 
details of that sort, though at present it may 
seem, oversanguine to expect time to do so 
much for her. Anyhow, I am sure there is 
the making of an interesting and energetic 
young woman in Clementine, and it is no 
breach of confidence to say that she bids fair 

113 




S& 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

to do her share towards making creation a 
place of seemly appearances. The great duty 
of adorning creation is, of course, one that we 
should all perform according to our several 
abilities, but girls and women, being qualified 
to do best at it, are expected to give it special 
attention. One of the efforts that is most 
continuously made in the direction of Clem- 
entine's education concerns the elevation of 
her standard of personal appearance. It is 
an important part of the education of all 
young persons. At West Point, for example, 
they attend to it scrupulously, making it part 
of the systematic training which youth in the 
government's seminary there undergo. To 
be neat and trim and clean, to stand straight 
and to walk properly, is at least as important 
for girls as it is for West Point cadets, for 
how girls look and bear themselves makes a 
prodigious difference. A slouchy boy is a 
grievous thing, but a slouchy girl is as bad 
as a slouchy soldier. 

Don't imagine that because Blandina is 
apt, as I have intimated, in acquiring book 

114 





GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

knowledge, I expect her to turn out a bad 
house-keeper and ineffective in practical af- 
fairs. Bookishness is an unreliable test of 
ability. I have known bookish women who 
were profuse readers and delighted in study, 
but were not of much use for anything else, 
and I have known other women who took 
books rather hard, but amply made up for 
that disability by their closeness of observa- 
tion and mental energy. As between persons 
who read to save themselves the trouble of 
thinking, and persons who observe and think, 
but find reading laborious, the latter are like- 
ly to be best worth while. But reading, obser- 
vation, and thought ought to work well to- 
gether and to make for practical efficiency. 
A mind that is capable of Greek and analyti- 
cal geometry is usually capable also, under 
proper training, of omelets, good coffee, and 
household administration. Blandina cannot 
make an omelet yet (not more than one cook 
in five hundred can), but last spring, when 
our family went five weeks without a pro- 
fessing cook, she learned to scramble eggs 

ii5 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

very well. And she makes excellent toast, 
too. To make good toast seems easy, but I 
never knew a dunce to do it. 

I heard Mrs. Robbins commended the other 
day as a remarkably fine woman. Her great 
merit had been demonstrated, her laudator 
said, by her making Charles Robbins such a 
good wife. That means, of course, that she 
has made a fairly good husband out of Charles. 
When you hear of women being good wives 
it is worth while to remember that the usual 
proof of a good wife is a good husband. It was 
no great trick to make a good husband out of 
Charles, for he was always a man with proclivi- 
ties towards righteousness; but he is an im- 
portant man, with great opportunities of in- 
fluence and usefulness, and she is in truth an 
admirable wife for him, wise, handsome, de- 
voted, and harmonious. I respect her opin- 
ion about girls and their education because 
she is an exceedingly good example of her 
kind of American woman. Charles has got 
rich, so she has the opportunities that come 
with money, as well as those that come with 

116 






GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

brains, but she would have been just as val- 
uable a partner to a man with fifteen hundred 
a year as to a rich man. Mrs. Robbins went 
to a girls' college, and she holds that girls who 
can ought to go to college. Sending a girl to 
college, she says, should be at least as much 
a matter of course as sending a boy to college. 
She thinks that, of the two, the girls need it 
more, because a woman's life tends to be nar- 
rower and more secluded than a man's, and 
ordinarily she has less opportunity for intel- 
lectual growth after she marries. Mrs. Rob- 
(_ bins complains that people who plan from the 
first to send their boys to college still leave the 
college question open as to their girls. If 
Clementine were hers, Clementine would go to 
college, and no questions asked. I am not so 
far advanced as that yet. Let Blandina go 
to college if she will. She will take it easily, 
and will doubtless like it enormously. She 
is highly gregarious in her inclinations — tak- 
ing three dolls to bed with her, as a rule — and 
she positively likes to get her lessons. I am 
told she has in her the making of a school- 

117 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




teacher. Let her go to college and learn all 
there is, including discrimination in the choice 
of companions. We need some one in the 
family to read Taine's English Literature, and 
Symonds's History of the Renaissance in Italy, 
and Gibbon, and Burke, and Spenser's Faerie 
Queene, and to lead the conversation away from 
groceries, dress, the cost of things, and gossip, 
into the higher regions of the mind. You must 
have noticed how it is about talk — that we | 
talk, in so far as we can, up to or down to the (. 
supposed capacity of our listener. Perhaps 
Blandina will read Dante; I would have read 
him before now if there had been any call in 
our family for conversation about him. I 
have read Mrs. Wiggs. There was a call for 
talk about Mrs. Wiggs. Clementine read 
Mrs. Wiggs five times. Jonas is going to col- 
lege, and may know as much as Blandina ever 
will, but I have no expectation that Jonas 
will raise the pitch of the family conversation. 
Somehow when college boys are not talk- 
ing about baseball they are talking about 
football, and for a change they talk about 







GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 

hockey and track athletics. They are no 
intellectual help to a parent. I don't know 
what they teach in girls' colleges, and it 
doesn't greatly matter, but Blandina can 
learn it, and if she gets out at twenty-one, 
duly equipped and qualified for remunerative 
employment as a teacher, so much the better. 
If it is expedient for her to earn her living, 
teaching is important work and makes an ex- 
cellent resource, even when it does not be- 
come a career. 






THE EXCHANGE OF CHILDREN 




They have a family custom in some parts 
of Europe — in Denmark and Switzerland more 
particularly — of swapping children for a while. 
They think in Denmark that it is not good 
for a child who is soon to earn its own living 
to live all the time at home. We recognize 
the same sentiment when we send our boys 
and girls to boarding-schools. We want them 
to get a wider experience of life than they could 
get at home, to be thrown somewhat more on 
their own resources, to be quit for a time of the 
imperfections of our training and get a train- 
ing of some other kind, which, though doubt- 
less imperfect, will have the stimulating ef- 
fect that comes from variety. But boarding- 
schools are expensive, and the great majority 
of parents cannot afford to send their chil- 
dren to them. 



I20 





THE EXCHANGE OF CHILDREN 

The Danes and Swiss meet that difficulty 
by this practice of swapping children. The 
Copenhagen grocer, loath that his boy should 
be altogether city bred, sends him off for a 
season to a good farmer whom he knows and 
trusts, and takes the farmer's boy into his 
own family in his place. The grocer's boy 
gets a good taste of country life, learns that 
potatoes do not grow on bushes nor cabbages 
on trees, and finds out that Copenhagen isn't 
the whole world and that there are other in- 
dustries besides the grocery business. The 
farmer's boy has his wits sharpened by rub- 
bing up against a town. He makes himself 
useful in the grocer's shop, learns to sell goods 
and add up accounts, and is a brighter man 
and a better man of business in consequence. 
And it may be that the grocer's boy will de- 
velop so strong a taste for agriculture as to 
turn farmer, or the farmer's boy show such an 
aptitude for trading that he will prefer to 
follow that pursuit. So the interchange helps 
in the important work of suiting employment 
to taste and getting the round pegs in the 

121 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




round holes and the square pegs in square 
ones. 

In Switzerland this kind of exchange is 
practised, not only as a means of broadening 
experience, but of learning languages. South 
Switzerland speaks French, North Switzer- 
land German. Children from the southern 
cantons are 'sent north, and vice versa, and 
start presently on their modest careers with 
two languages at least at their service. To 
the same special linguistic end Swiss children 
are sent to Germany and others to England, 
for Switzerland is a land of inns, taking a 
huge annual tribute from its neighbors in 
Europe and from America, and the ability to 
speak to every tourist in his own tongue has 
a definite money value to a wage-earning or 
trading Swiss. 

In all the European countries which support 
great military establishments and require 
military service from most of the young men, 
an effort is made to make this enforced service 
yield as useful a change as possible and serve 
a valuable educational turn. In France es- 



122 





THE EXCHANGE OF CHILDREN 

pecially, where all able-bodied young men, 
except a few that are exempt, must serve 
three years in the army, pains are taken to 
send the Paris recruits to the country, where 
some of the poison may be worked out of 
their systems, and to send the country boys 
to Paris, where their peasant sluggishness 
may be quickened by new and stimulating 
sights. Officers are actually detailed to take 
squads of the country recruits to the Paris 
art galleries and museums. Think of that; 
how French it is, and how admirable ! — though, 
to be sure, we Americans are capable of doing 
the like with our public-school children — per- 
haps we are doing it already. 

School-masters and other enlightened people 
on the French - German frontier exchange 
child for child — a French boy for a German 
girl sometimes — and each family not only in 
time gets back its own with interest, but 
meanwhile, by harboring and studying and 
looking after and loving an alien child, gets 
to know better, and think more kindly of, the 
nation to which that child belongs. Sov- 

123 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




ereigns marry their children to the sons or 
daughters of other sovereigns, largely for the 
sake of strengthening the ties between the 
nations and increasing the inducements to 
keep the peace. In a smaller way these mi- 
grations of children serve very efficiently the 
same purpose. 

During the recent visit to Paris of members 
of the English Parliament, the question of 
sending French children to live for a time in 
England and of bringing English children to 
France was several times touched upon. 
Something of that sort is already being done 
in commerce. A certain great shop in Paris 
has free courses in English for its clerks, and 
those that are the most successful in these 
courses are sent to London for six months 
and placed in some shop there. French in- 
dustrial firms often exchange young clerks with 
London houses in the same line of business. 
A number of excellent French schools give free 
tuition to English pupils on the sole condition 
that they speak English with the other pupils 
so many hours of the day. This system is in 

124 




-4&? 






SEWING 



THE EXCHANGE OF CHILDREN 



use in many English schools. The younger 
the children are sent away, the quicker will 
be their progress in the foreign tongue. 

I wish we could have here in our own coun- 
try somewhat more of this shuffling of the lit- 
tle cards in the world's great pack. What we 
thought of the usefulness of such exchanges 
for the stimulation of international amity ap- 
peared three or four years ago when the Cuban 
teachers came to the Harvard summer school 
and saw what could be shown them of this 
country. It appeared again more lately in 
Governor Taft's appeal for provision for bring- 
ing Filipino youths here to be educated. But 
that is a governmental enterprise. Some- 
thing much more like the swapping of chil- 
dren from one home to another in our own 
country goes on now in the summer on a great 
scale, when thousands of children from the 
cities are sent away from cramped tenement- 
houses and hot streets to be guests in the 
homes of farmers. It is not quite like the 
Danish and Swiss system, because the visits 
are short and the hospitality as yet one-sided 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

The city children get into the country for a 
while, but the country children don't come to 
town. There is not on any large scale an 
exchange of advantages, but only a great 
provision of country hospitality to city chil- 
dren. 

I don't know how we can mend that. Here 
in New York people live so like sardines in a 
box, and spare beds, not to speak of spare 
rooms, are so decidedly an attribute of the 
rich, that the possibility of offering to coun- 
try children such hospitality as the country 
offers to city children seems remote. Yet lots 
of the country children might come to town 
and visit with profit and with pleasure, even 
though they slept in bunks or suffered all the 
hardships of congested flat life. Very likely 
the country child would find such hardships 
extremely entertaining, and get as much fun 
out of sardine-box living as overindulged 
civilized people get out of picnics. Parkman 
liked to share the privacy and shelter of Ind- 
ian huts with Indian families, and folks in 
New York are not much tighter packed than 

126 






THE EXCHANGE OF CHILDREN 

Parkman's Indians, and are cleaner, besides.* 
The old-time country boy who came to town 
to work in a store slept under the counter, 
but that was in the days of fewer people and 
simpler things. I wish the country children 
might come to town more. The country 
boys ought to have a chance to compare the 
perils of the crush hours on the Elevated with 
the perils of sharing pasture-lots with angry 
bulls. And then the street-crossings where 
crowds and carriages and trolley-cars mingle 
in confused and deadly unconcern! I know 
a boy who comes to town for his vacations 
from a country school and who finds the Ele- 
vated vastly entertaining, and rides on escala- 
tors in various places by the hour, but whose 
heart sinks at the prospect of crossing Fifth 
Avenue or Twenty - third Street. It takes 
weeks for a country child to learn, and dare, 
to cross a crowded street. 

It is good for a child to make visits even in 
its own neighborhood. The last time Blan- 
dina had a bad cold that would not break up, 
her grown-up cousin came one day and carried 

127 










THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

her off to spend a week. She only went a 
mile away. She kept on with her school and 
all her other lessons. But she got into a new 
atmosphere, where the in-doors air was a trifle 
different, where the touch of a new cook gave 
variety to the food, where new topics pre- 
vailed in the talk, and where there was no 
sister Clementine who felt qualified by three 
years' longer experience of life to usurp the 
authority of an older person and irritate her 
by suggestions about her conduct. She came 
back cured of her cold and revived in her 
spirits. 

I have known of Western cities where this 
sort of neighborhood visiting is very com- 
mon, especially among girls. It is really 
a sensible plan. When you can get most 
of the sensations and benefits of paying 
a visit without buying a railroad - ticket or 
leaving town, it is often very well worth 
doing. 

If the East and the West, the North and the 
South, in our big country could swap children 
as the Danes do, it would be much to the 

128 





THE EXCHANGE OF CHILDREN 

advantage of American cohesion. Distance 
makes that difficult, but, as it is, there is much 
flitting back and forth. Western youth still 
come East to school and college in greater 
actual numbers than ever, though in propor- 
tion to the present Western population the 
number is far less. But Eastern lads and 
girls do not go West yet in search of schooling. 
That may come in time. The might of the 
Western spirit is recognized in the East, and 
we may some day see Boston parents sending 
their boys to the great Western universities 
in order that they may imbibe the feelings 
that are to govern in this country and catch 
the dominant Western point of view. To 
know the West has come to be a mighty impor- 
tant branch of Eastern education. To know 
the South is an important branch of Northern 
education, and vice versa. The late Charles 
Francis Adams learned as a boy to know Eng- 
lish character by going to school in England. 
When he was minister to England during the 
civil war that knowledge stood him in good 
stead. It was Cecil Rhodes' s idea that his 

129 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

American Oxford scholars should learn to be 
useful to both countries. He was only carry- 
ing out on a larger scale the practice of the 
Danes and the Swiss. 







CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 



We don't all get what we want in this world, 
but of those who get much of anything, very 
few get it unless they have wanted it with an 
effectual desire. To want something good 
and hard, and persistently, is almost an indis- 
pensable first step towards getting it. I 
think that most of us are rather lazy wanters. 
The average mind is not naturally riveted in 
attainment. The average man in all walks 
of life is prone to work along rather easily, 
living by the day and reaping the reward of 
his industry as it comes. If he goes without 
what he would like to have rather than take 
the trouble to get it, we think nothing worse 
of him than that he is lazy. But if he has 
children it is different. We are strict with 
him about his children's wants. If he lets 

131 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

them lack desirable and attainable things be- 
cause it is too much trouble for nim to get 
them, we think he is a pretty poor father and 
not much of a man. The natural, ordinary 
man needs the spur of necessity or strong obli- 
gation. The need of making a living for him- 
self is doubtless enough to start him in work. 
For the very work's sake, if he likes it, if 
for nothing more, he will doubtless go a great 
deal further than mere comfortable subsistence 
compels. For art's sake some men, like Sar- 
gent the painter, seem to go the whole length 
of their powers and work out the very best 
there is in them. For duty's sake, or in the 
service of religion or of the State, very many 
good men have done the like. But the nat- 
ural man profits by family cares. His driv- 
ing-wheels take harder hold on the rails if he 
is weighted. Love will tempt him on with a 
stronger and steadier pull than ambition or 
mere rapacity. 

And he will be a gainer, too, in the impor- 
tant end of getting happiness out of life ; for 
is there, on the whole, any sport going that 

132 






CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 

entertains so well and engrosses so ardently, 
so many people, as the great and honorable 
pastime of supporting a family? No game 
ranks high as a sport that has not some risks 
in it. There are breathless chances a-plenty 
in this one. You may not do it, and that is 
mighty embarrassing if you have the family 
to support. You may do it, but not to your 
taste. That is not so bad, for there is always 
the expectancy of mending your performance. 
Is there not some cell in your brain that is 
capable of greater activity, some inertia of 
your will that can be overcome, some addi- 
tional nimbleness of wit or fingers that can 
be attained ? The kinks shall come out if 
there are any kinks, and then — then? Oh, 
then, the children shall have more "advan- 
tages." What the advantages are doesn't 
greatly matter so long as they seem to be ad- 
vantageous to the children. They may be any- 
thing from more cream at breakfast to a sum- 
mer in Europe. They may be new shoes, or 
better clothes, or better schooling, or music- 
lessons, or dancing-lessons, or horse-back ex- 

1 33 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




ercise, or a bigger house in a better street. 
"Advantages" are relative and depend upon 
what our contemporaries who live within 
sight of us are doing for their children. 
There is no maximum of what solicitous 
parents want to do, but in most families 
the understanding about the minimum that 
is requisite is pretty definite. And I sus- 
pect that with us Americans that minimum 
tends to be rather too high. There isn't 
really such a vast choice in schools; but 
so far as there is a choice we want our chil- 
dren to have the best. Expensive clothes are 
no particular advantage to a child ; but dear ! 
dear! how we love to have our children " look 
nice"! Social opportunities are often snares 
that waste time and turn heads and make 
snobs, but they have their value, and, wisely 
or not, parents take thought and bestir them- 
selves that their children may be "in it." 
We work for our children, plan for them, 
spend money on them, buy life insurance for 
their protection, and some of us even save 
money for them. This last tribute is the 

i34 






CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 

most affecting of all. Making money is pleas- 
ant, even though it is sometimes laborious. 
Spending it on one's children is a delightful 
form of self-indulgence. Buying life insurance 
is something we do to promote our own peace 
of mind. We praise ourselves more or less 
for all these exercises, but without much rea- 
son, for they all gratify us. But saving, for 
our children's start in life, actual earned 
money, that we have in hand and might spend 
on them, is evidence of serious self-denial. 
Profound must be the depths of the affection 
that will induce a man to save money for 
others to spend, unless, indeed, his income gets 
so big that he can satisfy all his reasonable 
wants and have some left over. Spending 
money is so pleasant an indulgence ! To fore- 
go buying children pleasures which you are 
here to share, for the sake of pleasures or com- 
forts that they may enjoy after you are gone, 
is an astonishing flight of altruism. Yet par- 
ents not infrequently attain it. It is noticed 
by various observers that since the fires of 
hell come to be considered theoretical, men 

135 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

have pretty much lost the fear of death, and 
are substituting for it the fear of leaving their 
families inadequately provided for. Even 
thrift is not too difficult a virtue for an ordi- 
nary affectionate parent to attain! 

And of course children are a mighty incen- 
tive to other virtues besides industry and 
thrift. They have enormous influence on the 
parental conduct. " As for me," said a guest 
at a ladies' lunch-party, " I cannot play bridge 
for money: I have a son." "So with me," 
echoed another. "With Charles growing up 
I could not do it." Bachelors and childless 
people may say, "After us the deluge," and 
behave as though very high water was over- 
due. That will not do for parents. They 
have a stake in the future. They are inti- 
mately concerned in maintaining standards of 
conduct, and constrained to do their share 
in keeping society virtuous enough to furnish 
a safe environment for the rising generation. 
They must ever be mindful, not only that 
there will be mouths in the world after they 
are gone, the filling of which concerns them, 

136 






CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 

but that a good name is rather to be chosen 
than great riches, and if a choice must be 
made between honor and money, an honor- 
able name, and the standards of behavior that 
made it honorable, are a better and safer leg- 
acy for their children than many dollars how- 
ever well placed. We care more for true re- 
spectability than we realize. All of us who 
are not fools would rather see our girls marry 
good men who are not rich than rich men who 
are not good. For our boys we covet only the 
kind of success that is consistent with integ- 
rity, and the fact that we have boys makes us 
by so much the more solicitous to keep our 
own feet out of paths into which we would not 
choose to have their feet follow. Indulgences 
that are fairly safe for Fifty are avoided be- 
cause they are not safe for Twenty-one, and be- 
cause Twenty-one keeps an eye on Fifty and is 
disposed to conclude that what Fifty permits 
himself to do is about right. 

It has been said that the commonest reason 
why so many men's minds stop developing is 
that when they get out of school — or perhaps 

137 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




out of college — they have to concentrate most 
of their attention on making a living. To 
incur responsibility for the maintenance of 
children is a measure not immediately adapt- 
ed to divert them from that employment, but 
as the children grow up and pass in their turn 
through the various stages of education, they 
are very commonly a strong and useful men- 
tal stimulant to their parents. They bring 
the old knowledge back into the house, and 
new knowledge with it. Their minds, not yet 
geared to workaday problems, run on matters 
more polite and more intellectual. I find that 
Clementine's incursions into grammar and 
history vary to great advantage the table-talk 
of our family, and her disputes with Blandina 
over what words are good and what are not, 
and what happened, and when and why, give 
the paternal mind very timely and valuable 
fillips. I am told that my neighbor, Lawyer 
Clinton, had never studied Latin until his 
boys began it, but he felt that he had to keep 
up, and by the time they got to Caesar he was 
in Caesar too, reading the story of the cam- 

138 





CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 

paigns in Gaul for his amusement in the even- 
ing, after his day's work at law. The last I 
heard he was getting out an edition of Hor- 
ace. Many a father has rubbed up his rusty 
Latin, or even Greek, in the stimulating com- 
pany of a growing child. Mothers have fol- 
lowed their boys, book by book, through 
school and college. The new knowledge of 
the rising generation, which sets so strongly 
towards science, and the new philosophies and 
histories, are brought inside the door of the 
parent whose children are concerned with 
them, and it is a dull parent whose interests 
are not broadened and quickened by the ex- 
perience. 

Then, too, there are the conclusions which 
grown-up people who have thought thoughts, 
have reached in their day, and put away in 
their minds. There they rest undisturbed 
for years it may be. But when the children 
come in turn to a scrutiny of the eternal veri- 
ties, again the old processes of reasoning be- 
gin their work in the parental mind, and the 
old conclusions, varied perhaps by riper ex- 

*39 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 







perience, find new expression in the service of 
youth. What we knew we recall; what we 
know we impart; what we don't know we are 
constrained to learn if we can, because new 
questions are brought to us by questioners 
whom it concerns us to answer. 

It has been the fashion to carp at the modern 
American father as a poor, overworked creat- 
ure whose office it is to bring home money 
for his wife and children to spend. He is de- 
rided for his meekness and condoled with as 
the victim of his own devotion. There is 
plenty of nonsense about all that. Are there 
so many ways of having fun on this earth that 
are more satisfying than working for one's 
own? If only the father's labors are truly 
profitable to his children, and they grow up 
as he would have them, there is no failure of 
amusement or misapplication of work. To be 
sure, his time and thought may be overmuch 
diverted to money-making, for it is a wise 
and skilful parent that can make much money 
do his children good, or can even prevent them 
from being harmed by it. The natural fruit 

140 

1 fr.. > 





CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 



of money is ease, and too much of that does 
not make for advantageous development in 
early life. Money hires good servants, and 
they are a great luxury, but I have heard 
parents who themselves valued that luxury 
lament that their children seemed to do noth- 
ing for themselves. For people whose time 
is precious and their strength taxed, to be re- 
lieved of all possible drudgery is excellent 
economy. To relieve children of drudgery to 
a sufficient extent to give them time for the 
other work that is laid out for them is a profit- 
able interposition. But some daily drudgery 
is good for every one, and very good for chil- 
dren. When Clementine, loath to put down 
her story in the exciting place, calls Susan to 
light the lamp for her; when Blandina drops 
her hat and coat in a chair and leaves them 
for Matilda to hang up, neither of them gets 
any parental encouragement. Ordering ser- 
vants may be good training for some grown- 
ups, and develop their executive ability, but 
for children a more important lesson is to 
learn what work is and what order means, 

141 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

and they should learn it betimes and by act- 
ual practice. 

Those American fathers that we hear of, who 
are immersed in business and leave their chil- 
dren to wander about the world, make a mis- 
take, but not the mistake of being too devoted. 
Their mistake is that they neglect their chil- 
dren, giving their whole attention to things 
of less importance. And another mistake 
that is easily fallen into by men who are used 
to being owners of many things and masters 
of many employes, is to think that because 
they spend money freely for their children 
and supply them with many unnecessary 
things, they own them, too, and have a right to 
shape their lives according to their own de- 
sires and whims. Money laid by makes for 
freedom of choice, but the great possessions 
of a parent may easily tend to restrict the rea- 
sonable liberty of the child. If the tail is 
big enough, it may wag the dog; if a fortune 
is great enough, it may dominate not only its 
possessor but his heirs. The man who has 
children and wants money is in a position that 

142 






CHILDREN AS AN INCENTIVE 

is favorable to wholesome exertion. We can 
all sympathize with his desires. I don't 
know that sympathy can be quite so safely 
bestowed on the man who has got together 
much money and wants children. Of course 
he wants them, to inherit his property so that 
he can die with more satisfaction. It is an 
entirely natural desire; I hope he may have 
them, but children don't do so much real 
good to the man whose work is done as to the 
man who is still at his work. And the phi- 
losopher may reasonably argue that the child 
who is born to a parent who is anxiously con- 
cerned to make him a useful and successful 
worker is born to a better opportunity than 
if he were hailed at birth as the welcome re- 
ceptacle of gains already acquired. 

Greatly important and greatly remunerative 
is this business of raising and training chil- 
dren and being trained in turn by them. It 
comes very near being the best worth-while 
thing there is. Only the duty of serving that 
larger family that we call the public, or the 
larger public that constitutes mankind, can 

143 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

rival it in weight of obligation and in richness 
of reward. It is, of course, matter for regret 
when the pressure of domestic responsibilities 
and the duty of providing for his children 
keep out of the public service a first - rate 
man whose services the public needs. But 
that does not often happen. When the pub- 
lic's need is acute enough, and the public 
knows its mind clearly enough about the man 
it wants, it gets its man, and his children 
must wait if necessary till the public has got 
through with him. But so far as personal 
enjoyment and profit go, the average man » 
cannot spend his strength, or what it yields, 
to better purpose than for his children, nor 
can he do better by society than by leaving 
behind him worthy and valuable living repre- 
sentatives of his labors on earth. 






WOMEN 



Souvent femme varie is a familiar senti- 
ment of the French language about women. 
It came down lawfully from Rome and Virgil's 
Vartum et mutabile semper femina. Persons 
with skill in the use of words seem in all ages 
to have liked to say smart things about wom- 
en in general, and especially things which 
convey a measure of deprecative disparage- 
ment. Even we Anglo-Saxons, who modest- 
ly assume to represent the real hard -sense of 
the universe, have a tradition that it is a 
woman's privilege to change her mind, and I 
dare say that that is part of the common law 
of England and of countries whose legal prin- 
ciples are of English derivation. She ought 
to have that privilege. So long as man pro- 
poses, woman's right of dissent ought to be 

i45 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

as much extended as the security of vested 
interests and the general welfare of society 
allow. Maybe she is more changeable than 
man. Maybe she is somewhat flightier, more 
subject to revulsions of feeling, more prone 
to be swayed by feelings rather than reason, 
more easily persuaded than convinced, and, 
in consequence, more subject to subsequent 
dissuasion. If so, very well! There are vari- 
ous considerations that explain it, if one cares 
for explanation. But to explain woman 
seems more or less of an impertinence. She 
represents two forces — God who made her; 
man who has been the chief influence in her 
development. Was there fault in her crea- 
tion ? Surely we will not venture to say that. 
We do not think it, either. We bow in grate- 
ful admiration of our Maker's handiwork. 
Have there been faults, then, in her develop- 
ment? Myriads of them, doubtless, if one 
regards particulars, but if there is complaint 
due let her complain, not us, for the faults 
are man's, and she is the victim. Whatever 
has gone wrong with woman in this world is 

146 





WOMEN 

man's fault. If she has been kept down; if 
she has been too much exalted ; if she has been 
taught too much or too little, has got out of 
her proper sphere or missed her due devel- 
opment because the sphere accorded her was 
too narrow— it is all man's fault, and he must 
expect to settle for it. Even if she is fickle, 
as France and Virgil suggest — but she is not 
fickle; that is not true of woman at large. 
Even if she is not always sure of her own mind, 
and is apter than man to change it, does not 
the final cause of that lie in the imperfect 
trustworthiness of man? The woman who 
is sure of her man is apt to be sure of herself. 
Of course there are exceptions, but the jilts 
and the defaulters are not all feminine. Men 
have the leading place in the world's activities. 
Woman waits for man to tell her what to do. 
If a man comes along who is equal to that 
duty, and whose direction is acceptable to 
her and gains her confidence, she follows its 
general intention and is content. But if such 
a man doesn't come along, Avhen she gets tired 
waiting she starts out for herself, and little by 

147 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

little establishes her own course and shapes 
her habits to it. Or if the man who does 
come along, and whom she determines to trust, 
proves, as usually happens, a person of defec- 
tive wisdom, she takes what guidance he can 
give her and ekes it out from her own stock 
of sense. If the case is worse still, she sup- 
plies such sense and guidance as she can for 
both. 

When men have been perfected and are just 
what they ought to be, there won't be any 
more trouble about women, or what their 
sphere is, or whether they are getting too 
much out of it. Their sphere is big enough. 
There is abundance of work in the world for 
all the men and all the women, and women 
will naturally take to the jobs that suit wom- 
en best. Nature will regulate that if men 
give her a fair chance. But it promises to be 
some time yet before men are perfected, and 
meanwhile vast numbers of them will shirk 
their proper work and leave it for some one 
else. If it has to be done, and there is no one 
else to do it, it will be done by women, and 

148 






WOMEN 

the women who do it will develop a capacity 
for doing it fairly well. 

There are startling examples of the develop- / 
ment of this capacity in women for doing 
men's work. When families that have been 
strong and prospered get started down -hill, 
and the men die off, or go to seed, or lose 
heart or health, it is not an uncommon thing 
to see the women develop under stress of 
circumstances a virile vigor that meets the 
storm and weathers it. Very able women are 
developed by defects in man, and of course 
when the wheel has once fallen to them and 
their wills have been trained to steering, they 
will not readily give up a place that they have 
fairly won. Nor should they. The mischief, 
what there is of it, has been done; let the 
consequences abide. The chief mischief is 
that, though a woman may come out strong 
in doing a man's work, the man whose work 
is done for him — if there is one— is apt to 
come out weak. He has lost his place, and 
the woman's place that is left vacant is not 
good for him. He can't fill it. If he is feeble, 

149 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




or gratefully dutiful, or discouraged, he may 
take it and perhaps do his best. But if there 
is strength and some audacity of impulse left 
in him, out he goes into the world to be a man 
and meet a man's fate. 

An individual woman may be cramped, sup- 
pressed, or developed out of her natural lines 
and in a measure unsexed by environment or 
circumstances. The women of a city, or of a 
State, or of a generation or age in any coun- 
try may rise or sink, develop or contract, as 
compared with their men or with other con- 
temporary women in their world. Woman- 
kind may have an element of variableness 
which observing males take note of, but wom- 
an, taken by and large and considered for as 
long a period as history covers, seems by no 
means a variable, but one of the most constant 
things in nature. We can't go back far 
enough to find a woman who doesn't look 
natural to us, and of whom we do not feel 
that if we knew her we would come almost 
as near understanding her as we come to un- 
derstanding the women of our own time and 

150 






>*wpwBr" : 



IN PADDLING 



r 




WOMEN 

acquaintance. In the Gizeh Museum there 
is a wooden effigy of a gentlewoman who lived 
some time in the Pyramid epoch — so the learn- 
ed say, and they put the Pyramids back about 
four thousand years before Christ. Six thou- 
sand years ago ! We used to be taught that the 
world began about then. Now we think we 
know that a thousand years are but as yester- 
day with the Almighty, and that six of them 
cut no great figure in the development of the 
human race. And yet six thousand years ago 
is pretty old times as we look back. Ten score 
generations ! That seems a reasonable antiq- 
uity, and this lady — they found her effigy in 
her tomb — look some time at the picture of 
it ! She isn't of our race, to be sure, but you 
will notice how absolutely, how contempora- 
neously human she looks. Her head-dress is 
a little odd, but that would come off, and 
with it off, and her hair done as our women 
do theirs, and a shirt-waist or any such detail 
of modern raiment on her, she would look 
nowise unusual across the breakfast - table 
from any one of us. 

151 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

The women of the past whose likenesses 
the great painters and sculptors have trans- 
mitted were women from the more favored 
and richer walks of life, but none of them 
seems to us even out of date. They are not 
the less women from being royal or princely; 
not the less familiar from being unknown. 

Are women better than men ? Certainly 
they are negatively better. They don't drink 
so much or smoke so much. They are less 
prone to crime, especially to crimes of vio- 
lence. Certain of their passions are much less 
obstreperous than the corresponding passions 
in men. Not all the temptations which men 
are subject to assail them with equal force. 
They are gentler than men, but that is partly 
because they are more timid. Do you think 
they are kinder than men? Timidity does 
not make folks kind, but inclines contrari- 
wise. Affirmative kindness commonly has a 
fair store of courage behind it. There is a 
deal of kindness in men, though it is not quite 
so near the surface as the kindness of kind 
women. Men are apt to be kinder to women 

152 





0> 



-»> 




WOMEN 

than women are, and women are apt to be 
kinder to men than to women ; and both these 
tendencies belong in the class of facts which 
we are used to call "providential." Beyond 
that, it seems hardly safe to generalize about 
the comparative kindness of men and women. 
But woman isn't really better than man. 
She is only different, and the marvels and ad- 
vantages of her differences are so prodigious 
that long, long ago she herself took perma- 
nent place in that distinguished class of things, 
just mentioned, that men call providential. 
Women and men are so inextricably tangled 
up that if the women were really better than 
the men the men would have to rise to their 
level. The other thing is what seems to hap- 
pen. The women keep to the level that the 
men attain. Their righteousness has tenden- 
cies to certain defects. They take more nat- 
urally than men to religion; they are more 
urgent promoters of temperance; but, as a 
rule, they don't appreciate the vital worth of 
freedom, without which religion tends to be- 
come a shackle and temperance a mere dep- 

153 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




rivation. One suspects that if woman had 
made the world she would have left out temp- 
tation. The Creator let it in, and with it the 
possibility of freedom. 

Certain phases of truth of a mystical qual- 
ity seem to come to earth most readily through 
women. At least women are more hospitable 
to them at the start than men. Perhaps their 
faith is easier stirred; perhaps there is a re- 
ceptive instinct in the feminine mind that 
man doesn't match. At any rate, woman, 
even if she does not herself set up as a prophet, 
accepts the prophet's message, whether it is 
true or false, more readily than man. The 
spiritualist mediums have all been women, 
and a very doubtful business they seem to 
have been in. The Christian Scientists are 
nine-tenths women, and one wonders whether 
that merely means that women are easier 
fooled than men. I don't think it does mean 
that, though like enough that is true. It 
means a quality of mind to be observed and 
wondered at, rather than too blindly trusted, 
but without which earth's prospects would be 

154 





WOMEN 

less hopeful than they are. Joan of Arc heard 
voices, and though the matter-of-fact Britons 
finally burned her, history by no means re- 
gards her as a deluded female. 

On women is laid most of the obligation to 
beautify existence. Jewels and fine raiment, 
fabrics of great price, beautiful in color and 
in texture, houses that are splendid, and gar- 
dens that are gay are chiefly for them. Man 
might be trusted to maintain the noble army 
of cooks, and see that the art of preparing 
food and drink did not fall into decay, but if 
men did not love women, and women did not 
love beauty and adornment, earth would not 
be so handsome a planet as it is, albeit the 
folks in it might still be active and well nour- 
ished. Women do not invent. It is unusual 
for a woman to have even a moderate talent 
for mechanics. They do not excel in driving 
nails or sharpening lead-pencils. Their car- 
pentry is a grief. There are no successful 
woman-plumbers. If women set the world's 
pace we should never have flying-machines. 
The sort of progress, so notable nowadays, 

J 55 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 





that depends upon machinery would stop. 
But if woman's influence was less than it is, 
there would be more wars, more drunkenness, 
more waste, and what men win from nature 
and add to knowledge would yield far less 
happiness than it does. 

Let us thank Heaven that, though some 
women go to college nowadays, and some 
vote and others want to, and though the 
new woman, whom we think we have devel- 
oped, has qualities which have caused her to 
be gratefully declined by heathen so progres- 
sive as the Japanese, woman has been for so 
very long so very much like what she is now 
that we have excellent grounds to hope that 
she will keep on to the end without change 
that will make her less womanly, or develop- 
ments that are more sweeping than man may 
hope to share. The improvement we may 
anticipate, in woman as in man, is not so 
much the development of finer individuals 
as the raising of the general average. The 
great men of to-day don't seem to be greater 
than the great men of long ago. Neither are 

156 ' 




*e~Z 








WOMEN 



the fine women finer. But there is a basis for 
the belief that the average has risen in intel- 
ligence and efficiency as civilization has pro- 
gressed. 

Some women always have been, and some 
women always will be, the superiors of most 
men, but there is no sign that women in gen- 
eral will ever equal, much less surpass, men 
at the business of governing and developing 
the earth. The old theory that woman is 
man's helper seems incorrigibly well founded. 
If the situation isn't satisfactory to her there 
is no help for it, for the conditions it came 
out of seem to be eternal. Women may vote. 
They will be none the less man's helpers if they 
do. They never will band together to put 
man down and teach him his place. They will 
push him ahead if they can; they will pull 
him along when they must ; they will influence 
him enormously as they always have done, 
but they will never conspire together on any 
very great scale to make him play second fid- 
dle. Women in general will never agree to 
have women bosses so long as there are com- 

157 










THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

petent men for that use. There always will 
be competent men so long as competent wom- 
en raise sons. The thing that is certain about 
woman is that she is man's indispensable mate, 
and that though she may rise with him or fall 
with him, she never, willingly or otherwise, 
will rise on his ruins. He may be a poor 
thing, but he is her own, the most valuable 
possession that nature has given her, and the 
one she is least disposed to disparage or mis- 
use. 







REAL LIFE 

I was speaking to Ferguson about the way 
he had degenerated since he came to New 
York. When I had known him in Slinterville 
he had been a person, but I had to confess to 
him that, in so far as I could judge from an 
observation which, to be sure, was superficial, 
he had come to be something no better than 
an incident. He did not deny it. It was true, 
he said, that he was hardly a person any 
more, but had become the attribute of an 
environment; but he maintained that his 
state was not so very bad so long as he recog- 
nized and accepted it for what it was, and 
did not delude himself with the notion that 
it was really life. 'There is life," said Fer- 
guson, " and there is work. There is a species 
of life of which work is an incident, and there 

J 59 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

is a species of work of which life is an incident. 
That phase of activity which we call living 
in New York is to be classed, so far as I am 
concerned, tinder this second head. Of course, 
considered as life, it is ridiculous; but con- 
sidered as work, it has many agreeable allevia- 
tions." 

"It is captivity," said I. "Life in any 
big city is captivity." 

"You may call it that," said Ferguson. 
"A man who has to work for other men is 
more or less a captive while he is busy with 
his tasks, wherever it is that he puts his work , 
in. To spend the day between plough-handles 
(if there are such things now) is captivity 
while it lasts, and a species of it to which a 
great many persons find more objections than 
to life in a big town. Life itself is captivity. 
We are captives because our spirits are shut 
up in bodies which have to be fed, and which 
have no wings to fly with. The fact that our 
bodies happen to be in New York and not in 
Slinterville isn't so very significant." 

I don't know that it is. It is what we 

160 




i .-- 





REAL LIFE 

think about and what we do that make the 
difference, rather than where we are, and 
there is no doubt that multitudes of people 
find thought and action satisfactory in New 
York. Yet there prevails a consciousness, 
wide-spread and regretful, that life in great 
cities is not quite real life. Some observers 
even go so far as to insist that it is incorrigi- 
bly artificial. It suits most of us in a general 
way, because we also are considerably arti- 
ficial. We get used to our kind of factory 
life. We don't like to get up our own steam, 
but find it easier in the morning to throw 
in the clutch that connects our personal 
machine with a line of shafting that never 
ceases to turn. We need compulsion; we 
need to be driven; to be in such close re- 
lations with a progressive community that 
we have to do our daily stint if we are to keep 
our place. But back of this need lurks the 
persuasion that real life is a condition of fuller 
freedom than we know, whereof the impulses 
come more from within and are shaped by 
greater considerations than immediate daily 

161 





s& 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

needs, and the hope of living somewhat more 
to our taste for a few years before we die. 

It is not a state of ease — this real life that 
we dream of — for we know that too much 
ease is no better for us than too much food or 
drink. It is not even a state of wealth, ex- 
cept that we are all prone to believe that if we 
had larger incomes, and were less strictly 
bound to the work of earning them, we could 
shape our lives more to our satisfaction. It 
is a state in which we shall think higher and 
wiser thoughts; shall love better, shall help 
more, shall work more efficiently for nobler 
ends, and be happier and better justified in 
doing so. The realization of a higher destiny 
is what we are after. Almost universally we 
city-dwellers seem haunted by a desire to 
get back to the soil, and to modify the in- 
fluences of man-made machinery and man- 
made streets and habitations by the inspira- 
tions of nature. It troubles us that spring, 
year after year, should work its miracles in 
the fields and the woods and we not see them, 
that year after year the cherry-trees and the 

162 





/?* 



REAL LIFE 

apple-trees should blossom and we not be 
there. We are missing too much; far too 
much! To watch the signs of the changing 
seasons is a consideration of things in general 
that is profoundly restful to us in our daily 
battle with details. 

Are there not compensations for our losses ? 
Do we want the earth? Oh yes, there are 
highly important compensations, else the 
town would never keep us; but we do want 
the earth, and our craving for it is a healthy 
appetite based on an instinctive appreciation 
of what, in the long-run, is good for us. We 
want real life, or at all events as large a share 
of it as we can get. The ideal of real life 
varies in individuals. Brown's ideal includes 
fishing. Every spring these many years he 
has broken out of town and hied him to the 
North Woods to be eaten of black flies, and 
to angle for trout. That is a taste of the real 
thing for Brown; the most real experience of 
all his twelvemonth, and it helps him to sus- 
tain the artifical comforts and duties of the 
rest of the year. Jones makes an analogous 

163 







^3^" 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

sortie in due season, and goes far north to kill 
salmon. Robinson journeys westward after 
big game. Smith has a yacht. Thomson 
shoots ducks. Fessenden has a farm with 
real cows on it, and hens. Simpson has the 
strongest impulse to get back to nature of 
any of them. Simpson is a plumber by pro- 
fession, and has some skill at carpentering. 
He can make a living and something to spare 
by those industries whenever he is content 
to stick to them. He works at them diligent- 
ly from November to May. But he has an 
avocation. He is a painter. When May 
comes he quits working at his trades for his 
living, and turns to his avocation and to the 
enjoyment of nature. Gathering in his sur- 
plus, and making a bundle of his belongings, 
out he goes onto the road with his sketch- 
book, and is a blessed tramp all summer long, 
wandering where he will, taking time as though 
all time were his, sketching and painting with 
as much pleasure as though he could do it 
well, denying his stomach somewhat, but in- 
dulging his soul, owning the earth, and enjoy- 

164 






REAL LIFE 

ing the fulness of it. I am told that Simpson's 
enjoyment of life is prodigious. There seem 
to be immense compensations about tramp t 
life, for men who take to it are apt to stick to 
it in spite of its manifold drawbacks and its 
obvious discomforts. Simpson follows it in 
a respectable and responsible fashion. He 
can do it, for he is a bachelor, indifferent to 
pecuniary acquisitions, and careless as to 
what kind of a funeral he has or at whose 
cost. His impulse, like Brown's, Jones's, 
Robinson's, Smith's, Thomson's, and Fessen- 
den's, is reversionary — an impulse towards 
the occupations or conditions of a more prim- 
itive life. Our forebears fished, hunted, 
sailed, and farmed. If we go back far enough 
some of them were nomads. We seem to 
have inherited proclivities for all their occu- 
pations, and long for them with recurrent 
yearnings, and pursue the faint shadows of 
them from time to time at great cost of time, 
labor, and money. Our quest is for a state 
of mind. We don't go fishing after fish, nor 
hunting after meat, but because we want to 

165 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




think different thoughts and feel different sen- 
sations. We would cheat time, and swap il- 
lusions. 

One great charm about children is that 
life is always real to them, and they don't 
have these reversionary longings after some- 
thing more genuine. The bird in the hand 
is the bird for them. The bird in the bush 
gives them no particular concern. When it 
comes time to go to the country they are 
ready; aye, they are eager. For any good 
thing the country may offer — flowers, grass, 
trees, birds, water, ponies, pets — they have 
lively anticipations beforehand, and in due 
time appreciation to match. They take short 
views of life: that is one of their good traits. 
Awhile ago Blandina had a birthday. There 
are five birthdays in our family, and hers is 
the only one that is kept. Two of the five 
belong to grown-up persons, who have reached 
a time of life when the sentiment about birth- 
days is, " Least said, soonest mended." Two 
others of them fall in the Christmas holidays, 
and tend to be merged in the general activ- 

166 






REAL LIFE 

ities of that season. But Blandina' s birth- 
day is at a safe distance from any other festival, 
and suffers from no sort of blight. It is kept 
because she keeps it. She is living real life, 
and attending to all its details. Months 
ahead she blocked out her birthday party, 
and as the time came nearer chose her girls. 
When it was time to send out invitations 
Blandina knew exactly how many were to be 
sent, and where each one was to go. Such 
details as the complexion of the ice-cream 
and the species of the cakes were clear in her 
mind. Everything about that party, down 
to her father's birthday offering, was predes- 
tined by herself. She had no misgivings 
about it ; no fears that the company would not 
have fun, or that she would fail to find due 
joy in her labors. Neither had she any 
doubts whether, on the whole, birthday par- 
ties were worth the trouble. Doubts seldom 
bother Blandina. She knows what she likes, 
and when her turn comes she arranges to get 
it. She also knows pretty definitely what her 
duties are, and they are usually done. To 

167 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

make her birthday party was a comparatively 
easy labor, because her requirements were so 
definite. Of course her party was a success. 
It is a comparatively simple labor to contrive 
success for persons of constant minds, who 
know what they want, want what they can 
have, and are pleased when they get it. They 
are the people to whom life is always real. 

I hear no complaints from Jonas about the 
unreality of life. Jonas is away at school in 
the State of Massachusetts. Life with him 
goes so earnestly that it is only by a prodig- 
ious effort that he finds time during the week 
to scribble a letter in pencil to his mother. He 
tells how Brampton of the Sixth form reached 
second base in the recent match while the 
guardian of that bag was in the air aspiring 
to the ball, and how the said guardian came 
down on Brampton's hand and spiked it, to 
the grief of the school, which fears that Bramp- 
ton's injury may prejudice its chances in the 
coming important match with St. Kits. He 
speaks of his progress in learning; cheerfully 
in the case of this branch, with less satisfaction 

168 






REAL LIFE 

in the case of that, and in the postscript he 
usually records: "I have busted my glasses." 
But when they are not busted, the life he sees 
through them is real. 

So as to Clementine. If there is sawdust 
in her doll she does not know it. Not but that 
she has sorrows. The day she came home 
to find that our dogling had gone to live per- 
manently with the man who spaded up our 
back yard it seemed for a time that there was 
no balm in Gilead. To say that the lost one 
had neither good sense nor good habits, that 
he was unteachable, unreliable, impossible, 
had no bearing on the case as Clementine saw 
it. "I never even had a chance to say good- 
bye to him," she wailed, and though when 
dinner came she ate her soup, her tears fell 
into it. No, life is no fiction to Clementine. 
It is a very real experience, even though three- 
quarters of it is spent in town. And a satis- 
factory experience, too, full of close observa- 
tion, swift reflection, and conclusions that are 
always interesting, though not always sound. 
To see Clementine standing by her bicycle at 

169 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




the other end of the block, inspecting the 
babies who are out taking the air, is to see a 
live person abounding in contemporaneous 
human interest. 

One of the greatest shows of real life any- 
where to be witnessed may be seen any fine 
Saturday in May in Central Park. Give the 
great town credit for its wonderful May par- 
ties. On one Saturday last May twenty 
thousand children, the papers said, revelled 
in the park all day. Certainly in one great 
meadow there were thousands; an incessant 
company, bright with color, careless, delight- 
ful; supervised, but not constrained, by 
hundreds of astute elders. Who has eyes to 
see will not ask for a sight more healing to 
the spirit than a park meadow full of joyous 
children on a brilliant May day. 

Children are like gardens, and the country, 
and the woods and streams, in their power to 
distract our minds from the machinery of 
living and bring them back to the realities of 
life. If we keep the child in us alive we get 
along, and children help us vastly in doing 

170 





REAL LIFE 

that. Most of them have an advantage over 
us grown-ups in not being much concerned 
with the ways-and-means problem and with 
money - making. They realize, as we may 
not, the injunction to take no thought for the 
morrow. They represent the primitive hu- 
man being to whose attitude towards life we 
have periodical impulses to revert. It is a 
truism that the attitude of a right-minded 
child towards life is the ideal attitude. Sup- 
pose all the world took it? Suppose all the 
world lived by the day, doing its daily task, 
and leaving the future to shift for itself? 
Would it get on worse than it does, provided 
each day's work was done? The future is 
the issue of the present and the past. No 
prescience of any of us can change it much. 
The great mass of Earth's people do actually 
live much as children live, doing daily what 
comes to hand, and leaving the final issue to 
Fate. The dog hides the bone he does not 
need to-day against to-morrow's wants. The 
squirrel lays up a store of nuts against the 
winter. The bees gather honey all summer 

171 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




long and accumulate a surplus. Men do the 
like, and do well. They need far greater 
stores than bees or squirrels, and they gather 
them. But when it comes to shaping the dis- 
tant future, how much of the thought taken 
to that end is beneficially effective? Think 
of the Philippines, think of the Transvaal, 
think of the Southern negroes, think of all 
the trust and commercial combinations that 
shrewd men have bent their brows and lost 
their sleep over; think of enormous fortunes 
won, of vast power exercised by few men — 
how much of all the scheming and planning 
of grown-up humans yields results that last 
beyond the day; and of the remote results, 
what is the ratio between benefits and mis- 
chiefs? The day's work counts for good or 
bad according to its wisdom and its spirit, 
but the plans men make to shape ultimate 
human destiny tend to be either superfluous 
or ineffectual. 




a J^ 











THE PINCH OF COMFORT 




We had finished talking divorce and had 
got onto politics. I can't remember whether 
Cattlett' s discussion of the prospective sack- 
ing of Newport grew out of our divorce talk 
or the next subject. I hope he will tell more 
fully sometime the tale of the lady of high 
fashion who, speaking for her group, said to 
him, "You know, Mr. Cattlett, it's only a 
question of time when we shall be looted." 
I didn't know that people of high fashion had 
such interesting thoughts. It was that that 
gave Cattlett the germ of that idea of the sack- 
ing of Newport — a delightful idea calling up 
ravishing visions of delectable loot, and 
repairing the fatigues of pillage with goose- 
liver pates and champagne. Cattlett hopes 
to be there with a catalogue telling where 

J 73 



the 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

best things are. When there is an art sale, 
he watches the papers to see where the best 
things go. When there is a loan exhibition, 
he notices where the best things come from. 
Not that he is rapacious. It is merely that 
he thinks a thoughtful man should face the 
future with the fullest information he can 
amass. 

Progressing to politics, we had agreed (ex- 
cept Dacre) that it was time there were again 
two sane political parties in the country. 
Dacre wouldn't agree to anything that prej- 
udiced at all the certainty of President 
Roosevelt's re-election. He had been to 
Washington and seen the siren of San Juan, 
and there was only one candidate in all the 
world for him, and, for the time being, only 
one party. But Cattlett and I, being family 
men, favored the existence of reasonable alter- 
natives. There should be at least two bas- 
kets, we thought, in which our country's eggs 
would be safe. Then Cattlett told how his 
father quit the old Democratic party after 
the Baltimore convention of 1856 and stump- 

T 74 





THE PINCH OF COMFORT 

ed Pennsylvania at his own cost all one sum-* 
mer for Fremont. He wasn't at all a rich man, 
either; but where the vital interest of the 
country seemed to be concerned he was in 
earnest, and had time and money to spare. 

''And living was cheaper then, Cattlett," 
said I. "Even a poor man could sometimes 
spare a little time from the pursuit of the 
means of subsistence. If the country got into 
a seriously bad hole, he could take, at a pinch, 
a month off, and try to get it out." 

Money went farther in 1856. Wages were 
very much lower; some kinds of food were 
lower, though manufactured things were high- 
er; but we all agreed that the great reason 
why living was cheaper then was that we 
didn't have to have so much. We could 
scrape along without so many comforts. And 
then Cattlett and I both joined in the wail 
that prevails so widely just now throughout 
this country over the difficulty of living with- 
in incomes. It is a little worse than usual, 
this year because the flush times are past, 
and incomes in many instances are not so large 

175 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

as they have been. Then, too, the cost of 
food and other necessaries has risen. But 
the chief trouble is that the standard of com- 
fort has been steadily and rapidly rising. I 
reminded Cattlett that Harvard College last 
year spent about forty thousand dollars more 
than its income. Its income turned out to 
be less than was expected, but the main diffi- 
culty lay in the rise in the standard of com- 
fort which has made it more expensive for 
Harvard College to live. 

" If so far-sighted and prudent a concern as 
Harvard College is misled," said I, "into an 
excess of expenditure, the rest of us may per- 
haps find solace in the thought that maybe 
circumstances are more than usually to blame 
for our more or less modest deficits." 

Dacre dissented, but he is a bachelor and a 
Scotchman. What does he know about the 
cost of living or the difficulties of achieving 
thrift. Is it much of a trick to furnish one's 
personal stomach with the raw material of 
energy, to house and clothe a single adult 
man, and provide him with clubs, books, 

176 





SHADOW-TIME 




THE PINCH OF COMFORT 

theatre tickets, vacations, church privileges, 
and spending-money ? No ; a competent adult 
man of Scotch descent may still compass all 
that and show a satisfactory annual surplus 
to his credit. But Cattlett understood. 

"Do your boys outgrow their shoes," he 
asked, " before they wear them out?" 

"Always; long before." 

"And your school-bills — let me see — must 
be so and so?" 

"They are." 

" And to keep the teeth of a growing child 
in order costs annually — " 

"Oh yes," I interrupted. 

"And so many servants cost — " 

"Yes, yes, and for rent all you've got left. 
Hold on! Ex pede Herculem. I see you 
know all, but don't divulge anything more. 
Respect Dacre's inexperience." 

"Well, how do you manage? Do you cut 
down your indulgences every year to off- 
set the increased length of your list of neces- 
saries and the increased cost of most of the 
items?" 

177 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

" Never!" said I. "Since you press me so 
hard, I never do. I go out and hustle for 
more money and think I'm going to get it. 
It's less trouble." 

" Oh, well! Maybe your earning capacity 
is elastic." 

" My hopes are always elastic." 

"Folly!" said Dacre. "I see your finish." 

"No, you don't. Does he, Cattlett?" 

" I hope not. I guess not. If he does, he 
sees my finish, too. He underrates the ef- 
fectiveness of the spur of necessity. But he 
hasn't got all the facts and can't read as much 
between your lines as I can. You see, Dacre, 
the prizes in the great game run to bigger 
figures than they used to, and it costs more 
to come in, that's all." 

" And in this country," said I, "it's such an 
infernally open game. No one is out of it 
who can manage to qualify. No one in this 
country has got anything, Dacre, that you or 
I or Cattlett may not aspire to, or might not 
have aspired to, if we had begun early enough 
and had had the right kind of a start and the 

178 





THE PINCH OF COMFORT 

right sort of brains and energies to go on with. 
I sometimes think the reason why the stand- 
ard of living is high is that we are all trying 
to live up to our opportunities, and to start 
our children — if we have children — in such a 
fashion that they may live well up to theirs. 
I dare say we would be happier and less ex- 
travagant if we were more rigidly classified 
and if our opportunities were more restricted." 
"Oh, come now," put in Cattlett, "don't 
kick down the ladder. We can stand the op- 
portunities if only we can manage to live 
down our comforts. You know about the 
man wiio made two blades of grass grow in 
place of one. I think his services have been 
overrated. So far as we are concerned, we 
don't need any more grass. Our cry is, ' Evil 
unto the day is the sufficiency thereof.' We 
want some one to relieve us from the awful 
pangs of comfort. Comfort — competitive com- 
fort — is gnawing at our ribs like the Spar- 
tan boy's fox, and we hide it under our coat 
and try to look happy. If only some one 
w T ould deprive us of our comforts, making 

179 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

scrupulously sure to deprive our neighbors of 
theirs at the same time, we would build more 
monuments to him than the grateful Carnegie 
has erected to Tariff. But if our comforts 
are taken away and our neighbors' comforts 
are left, it will not help us. If there is to be 
discrimination, let it be in our favor. Give 
us that, or else give us a horizontal cut. Find 
us a boll-weevil that will blast half the bud- 
ding comforts as they grow, and make them 
perish. Then the Chicago bank clerk can be 
happy, though married, and Harvard College 
can declare cash dividends, and distressed 
parents will not have to sell their votes to buy 
their daughters picture-hats." 

"Why not unload a few comforts, Cattlett, 
since they bother you so much?" 

" Can't do it, my boy. They're part of the 
system. It is the aggregation of comforts 
that constitutes the standard of living. To 
keep in sight of the standard of living is the 
price of opportunity — of many opportunities, 
that is, that you and I value. Living is cheap 
where opportunities are scarce; living is dear 

180 






THE PINCH OF COMFORT 

where opportunities abound. That is to say, 
the kind of living that enables you to im- 
prove the opportunities you value is dear. 
Of course, I don't mean that you can't live at 
small cost in a New York tenement-house, but 
you couldn't give dinner-parties there. Do 
you suppose you and I would cling to the cur- 
rent comforts of life if there were not some- 
thing in it besides ease?" 

' There certainly isn't much ease in it for 
us, Cattlett." 

" No, there's precious little. Think of the 
vast luxury of eating in the basement, and 
never having a table - cloth on your dining- 
table, and — and — " 

" Blacking your own shoes or letting them 
go bare, and wearing your old clothes, and 
having no plumber's pipes in the house to get 
out of order, and — " 

" Oh, come, I'd have hot water, anyhow.' ' 

11 You would ?. What for ?" 

"To wash in." 

"Wash! Would you wash? Why wash? 
The greatest of the forbidden luxuries is dirt, 

181 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




and cleanliness is one of the dearest and most 
troublesome of all the comforts. I believe 
you'd want a clean house. That implies the 
continuous labor of housemaids. Now, house- 
maids cost money, directly for wages, and in- 
directly for food and house-rent." 

"Well," Cattlett retorted, "what have I 
been telling you ? You can't get away from 
the standard of comfort without turning 
hobo. The things you buy with the money 
you earn are so obviously desirable that 
you would rather earn the money, if you 
can, than do without them. What costs? 
Cabs, opera tickets, theatre tickets, ball- 
gowns, automobiles, travel, horse -back ex- 
ercise! To be sure, but all those things the 
philosopher can brush aside without much of 
a pang. What he will pay for if he can scrape 
together the means is light, air, cleanliness, 
wholesome food, education, the apparatus of 
a simple hospitality, the privilege of associa- 
tion with the people he wants to see, the 
chance to whirl in the particular maelstrom 
that attracts him." 

182 






THE PINCH OF COMFORT 

" Go on ! go on ! Explain now that civiliza- 
tion is nothing more than a development of 
new wants." 

" It may be something more than that, but 
it is that. It makes a difference, though, 
what you want." 

" You wouldn't say, then, that the man who 
wants the most things is the most civilized 
man?" 

"As a rule, we don't want things that are 
entirely out of our reach. It would be a 
waste of time. The people who want the 
most things are usually the people who are 
best qualified to get what they want — that is, 
the richest people. Do you think the richest 
people are the most civilized?" 

"Not necessarily, of course," I answered. 
"Some of them are barbarians. But money 
seems to be, on the whole, the greatest civ- 
ilizing influence there is." 

11 How about religion ?" 

"It is funny about religion. There are all 
kinds of religion. When you and I say 're- 
ligion ' we mean Christianity. But there are 

183 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

several species of Christianity. I think a 
good grade of Christianity, fostering liberty 
and altruism, is the most civilizing influence 
there is. But where you have that you seem 
bound to have education, and where you have 
liberty and education you seem bound in the 
end to have wealth." 

" You can have wealth, it seems, without 
Christianity, but you can't have a sound arti- 
cle of Christianity without eventually having 
wealth. Is that it?" 

" I suspect there's truth in that. A sound 
article of Christianity makes for liberty and 
order; industry and education follow, and 
then, inevitably, wealth. And wealth bal- 
loons the standard of living, and the pinch of 
comfort makes hogs of all of us and drives 
us so hard that we haven't time to say our 
prayers." 

"Perhaps," said he, "you are going on to 
compute that the vast increase of wealth 
will stimulate greed and choke out religion, 
and then — " 

" Why, then, of course, liberty will droop, 

184 






THE PINCH OF COMFORT 

envy will increase, the security of property 
will become impaired — " 

"Ha! The sacking of Newport comes in 
sight, and I shall have a catalogue!" 

" But it isn't imminent. It won't come so 
long as opportunity still invites the mass of 
us and you and I continue to respond as we 
do to the pinch of comfort. As long as there 
are chances enough ahead to keep us moving, 
I shall not look to see a serious proportion of 
the population revert to the hobo condition. 
When you take to the woods and let your 
children go barefoot, I shall be around for a 
copy of your catalogue." 






A PROPER PLACE FOR 
GRANDPARENTS 

If you get ever so rich, what do you do? 
Buy a farm somewhere. If you have the root 
of a good matter in you, you will want to poul- 
tice a worn spirit from time to time with the 
healing airs and the restful scenes of the coun- 
try. If you get ever so poor, what do you 
do? Work harder, probably, if you are fit 
to do anything and can find anything to do. 
But if you have a spirit of the requisite fibre, 
and have come to just the requisite degree 
of impecuniosity, and circumstances and your 
experience of life favor it, you go and live in 
the country. You can live very cheaply in 
the country if you choose, and possess your 
soul in complete independence, and wear 
your old clothes with a cheerful spirit. You 

186 





PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 

will be quit of a host of obligations to fash- 
ion, to society, which may vex and oppress 
you in town, for the price of superfluities is 
by far the biggest item in the cost of ordinary 
living. You will miss opportunities, too, but 
not all opportunity. You will live face to 
face with nature. You will be able to say 
your prayers in peace, and develop the spirit- 
ual side of you if you have any, with only the 
smallest concern about landlords, grocers, or 
raiment. There are no taxes of any conse- 
quence in the country: think of that! The 
greatest luxury you get there is time, and the 
next greatest are sights and sounds and smells. 
If you have thoughts to think, the country 
gives you a great chance to think them. If 
you have books to read, you can read a lot of 
them in the country, even with kerosene at 
seventeen cents a gallon. 

On the other hand, if you have money to 
spend, what a chance to spend it the country 
offers you! Gardens, cows, horses, houses, 
stables, roads, milk at a dollar a gallon if you 
like, sheep, and dogs, and, most of all, chil- 

i 8 7 *» 







. 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




dren. It is no trouble at all to spend fifty 
thousand dollars a year on roads alone, if 
only you start with a fairly sharp land-hunger 
and push out your borders with due energy. 
You can get more for your money in roads 
than in diamonds or pictures, and roads are 
a permanent investment. They don't burn 
down; you don't have to keep them insured; 
you don't have even to keep them clean, for 
if you build them well, let the weeds grow 
never so thick on them, the roads will be there 
still. And once you put your money into 
them it stays. You can never get it out, nor 
can any one else. You cannot even be taxed 
adequately on them, for no assessor presumes 
to see much value in a road. Indeed, a very 
large sum of money can be hid in a country 
place where the assessors won't find it — in 
water-pipes, drains, and such things that are 
out of sight, as well as in gardens and planta- 
tions. A mushroom-cellar is a good, safe, in- 
conspicuous investment. If elaborately built, 
it will consume a good deal of money; and 
who would tax a cellar ? Greenhouses, stables, 

188 





PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 



and residential mansions stand up in plain 
sight. Go slow in expenditure for such things. 
It is a bother to keep them up, and there is 
no special point in having more of them than 
you want to use ; but roads are different. 

Each of us sees in the country what he 
has learned to see. Take a picture of a 
rolling meadow with sheep in it. The farmer 
sees in it wool, mutton, and rocks; the 
painter sees the picture; the pious-minded 
person sees the Divine touch and feels the 
Divine presence; the golfer sees a lovely 
slope, a place for a green, a chance to plant 
a bunker, and a good outlook for a long 
drive. He measures in his mind the dis- 
tance from the sheep to the farthest knoll, 
and wonders if there is room to avoid the 
elms. But each observer has doubtless some 
sense of each aspect which attracts his fellow. 
Even the sheep will make better mutton for 
having run in a beautiful field, for it is a 
great mistake to think that farmers and golf- 
ers and sheep are so bent on the main chance 
as to be unaffected by the loveliness of nature. 

189 







THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

It does them good, though sometimes they 
are not conscious of it at the time. 

Another picture, where the road winds in 
among the trees. It is early fall, for see the 
leaves! And if a fox should come through 
the fence at the left, it would probably be 
in the early morning, and the dew would 
be heavy on everything in that clear sky. 
But what delightful board fences, and how 
sweetly any one of those top boards would 
crack under a hunter's heels! A board fence 
is getting to be a rare sight nowadays when 
the whole country is filling up with wire. 

But perhaps such thoughts profane a scene 
so peaceful. The excuse for them must be 
that the great problems of country life — as, 
indeed, of life elsewhere — are occupation and 
profit, and that sport, where it exists, while 
it lasts, helps to solve at least one of those 
problems. But such a sport as hunting in 
the country is chiefly for the delectation of 
persons who find, or have found, a fiscal 
profit elsewhere. Hunting, shooting, polo, 
even golf, are seldom a natural growth of any 

190 






PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 

cultivated soil in America. They flourish, 
where they do flourish, in the rural precincts, 
to be sure ; but the cities, and the more intri- 
cate and remunerative industries of urban 
life, support them. They are suburban rather 
than strictly rural in their nature; yet they 
spread wider and grow more important every 
year, as cities grow and the increase of wealth 
increases leisure, and as the increasing strain 
of city life constrains more and more families 
to consider a country home for at least part 
of the year a necessity. It is on the refugees 
from the cities that the problem of country 
occupations bears hardest. The farmer has 
no trouble of that sort, especially in the sum- 
mer, but the migratory city family has to 
face every spring not only the query, " Where 
shall we go this year?" but the further one, 
"And what shall we do when we get there?" 
Usually the family settles upon some place 
where there are other city families which will 
keep it in countenance and help it pass the 
time. That is a good plan enough, but there 
are hosts of families that adopt it every year 

IQI 




^■< 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

only for lack of a better one, and who cherish 
the hope that presently the way will open to 
them to acquire a permanent abiding-place 
in the real country, in some region that is not 
suburban, not citified enough to impair either 
its charm or its cheapness, not so remote as to 
be too hard to reach, and not so defiantly rural 
as to be lonely. In such a place, to have a 
house so simple as not to be burdensome, a 
horse possibly, a hired man or part of a hired 
man, a garden with nasturtiums and holly- 
hocks in it, a barn, perhaps a cow, and very 
likely chickens, and to have time to read, ' 
time to sew, time to rest and do nothing, and 
to live independent of all the world — that is 
many a city family's dream, and once in a 
while some family develops grit and enter- 
prise enough to realize it. But it takes a 
good deal of grit and no little aggressive en- 
terprise. It means getting out of the beaten 
track, ignoring the point of least resistance, 
and making one's own decisions. It is more 
a question of mental resources than of money. 
For to a family that, at a pinch, is sufficient 

192 





PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 

unto itself; that can find society anywhere 
where there are human beings, and occupa- 
tion anywhere where the sun rises and sets; 
an independent country life is neither very 
difficult nor very dear. But to live profit- 
ably on one's own hook even part of the year 
takes a good deal of intellectual stamina, and 
most of us easy-going, imitative, gregarious 
people are chary of attempting it. We feel 
the need of a constant incentive to exertion, 
and commonly find it in summer in the social 
opportunities and demands that assail us. 
We will bestir ourselves more, as a rule, to 
keep our end up with our neighbors than to 
strengthen our minds or develop our spiritual 
possibilities. 

Well, we have to take ourselves in this 
world as we find, ourselves. If a shady road 
that borders a suitable stream is waiting for 
us somewhere, and we prefer to wear good 
clothes on the piazzas of a summer hotel, 
that's the sort of folks we are, and we must 
hope that the meals and the society of the 
hotel are satisfactory. Even though we are 

193 





^ 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

a bit weak in the knees, so that even a reason- 
able measure of seclusion daunts us, still the 
country is coming our way, for with trolley 
lines and rural delivery and increased popula- 
tion, and the constantly increasing overflow 
from the cities in summer, distance becomes 
less and less a bugbear, and social privileges 
are more and more diffused. 

The country is a good place to be born in, 
a good place to die in, a good place to live in 
at least part of the year. More than half the 
people in the United States find it a good 
place to live and work in all the year round. 
But for them, as has been said, country life has 
no special problem that is not in the course 
of solution day by day. They have their 
work that yields them a living, and the so- 
ciety of their neighbors, and their children as 
they grow up either settle near them or go to 
town. But the city man who longs for at 
least a share of country life for his family and 
himself must still, as a rule, hold fast to the 
town. There his business is. On his hold 
there commonly depend his income and the 

194 





PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 

future of his children. Four-fifths of his days 
between twenty and sixty he must spend in 
a city, even though he spends half of his nights 
out of town. What helps solve the problem 
for him is the fast trains that carry him 
twenty, thirty, even fifty miles out of town 
in the late afternoon, and back in the early 
morning. There is a lot of charming country 
within practicable reach of the American 
cities. Besides the men who travel back and 
forth from ten to forty miles a day, there is 
the army who go to the country in summer 
once a week, on Friday, and stay till Monday, 
and spend, besides, their summer vacations 
with their families. Every year, as cities 
grow bigger and trains make better time, 
more and more diligent Americans lead this 
laborious life of daily or weekly travel. It 
is not ideal — it is too hard work for that — but 
it is better than not to live in the country at 
all. No doubt as wealth increases in this 
country, and men grow wiser, it will be more 
common than it has yet become for success- 
ful workers to retire from business when they 

195 







&3&~ 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

can afford to, or at least to work less strenu- 
ously and with longer periods of rest. Busy- 
men who can afford it rest a great deal as it 
is, and to that is chiefly due the rapid develop- 
ment which is everywhere noticeable of the 
sort of country life which has its roots in 
town. 

To a citizen who has attained to the hon- 
orable distinction of being a grandparent a 
country home is a most enviable luxury. 
Young parents with new children commonly 
have their livings to make and their children 
to educate, and have to stick pretty close to 
town and keep hard at those engrossing duties. 
But grandparents ought to have money laid 
up, time to spare, and places in the country 
where their grandchildren can come at any 
time in the year and live with them. The ir- 
responsible indulgence of young children to 
which grandparents are so addicted can be 
carried on to the very best advantage in the 
country. Grandparents should have gardens 
where babies can pick flowers without fear of 
discipline. They should keep creditable cows, 

196 






PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 

and sagacious hired men who like children, 
and tame horses that it is safe to drive, and 
ponies of assorted ages and different degrees ££ 
of spirit. It is well for them, too, to live 
within convenient distance of streams that 
drift lazily through the landscape with no 
mosquitoes near them, and with trees proper 
to sit under or row past. Such streams, duly 
bordered with umbrageous vegetation, are 
convenient for the older grandchildren during 
the courtship period. The young can't pro- 
vide such an environment for themselves. 
Their parents — unless they are rich — com- 
monly have to spend most of their money for 
rent, food, clothes, and education, and are 
prone to skimp when it comes to rural ex- 
penditures. But to have grandparents with 
right ideas about living and proper country 
places to live in is immensely advantageous 
to grandchildren, vastly convenient for par- 
ents, and as remunerative to the grandparents 
themselves as anything in the market. 

But, of course, grandparents, to be satisfac- 
tory and thoroughly useful in their vocation, 

IQ7 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




must be of the right sort — competent with- 
out being fidgety, indulgent — yes, over-in- 
dulgent — without being foolish enough to im- 
pair the confidence of parents, and such re- 
specters of human liberty as to hold that what 
a child wants to do is the best thing for that 
child to do, provided there is no sound rea- 
son to the contrary. Grandparents with real 
farms are best — farms where hens lay under 
barns and in hay-mows in the spring, and 
where protesting pigs meet a tragic doom in 
the early winter, and where apples grow pro- 
fusel v, and cider - casks stand in rows in No- 
vember with the bungs out and straws handy. 
And, of course, there ought to be a cornfield, 
and pumpkins, and mice and moles under the 
corn-shocks as they stand in the field in the 
fall, and terriers to hunt them when the corn- 
stalks are borne away to the barn. All this, 
to be sure, has to do with real farming, where- 
as it has been a more artificial and supple- 
mentary sort of country life that we have 
been considering. But, after all, why shouldn't 
grandparents be real farmers ? When it comes 

198 






PROPER PLACE FOR GRANDPARENTS 

to that, farmers in America have proved 
themselves far and away the most success- 
ful grandparents the country has produced. 
It has been the rule that the vigorous men 
who have forged ahead in the towns have 
come from the country. Perhaps it is not 
the rule now in quite so striking a measure, 
but it is the rule still. In the slower life of 
the country the energy seems ever to be ac- 
cumulating which feeds the bustle and the 
progress of the driving cities. In the town is 
the brilliant flame, but the wick is fed by the 
country. It is because it is so well understood 
that country air and sights and all the proc- 
esses of country life are necessary to main- 
tain the vigor of family stocks that we see 
this constant reaching-out of the dwellers in 
towns for all of the country that they can get. 
It is going on more and more, urged by in- 
creasing need as city life grows more and 
more artificial, and aided by the wonderful 
development of cheap and rapid transporta- 
tion. The rich in America are all the time 
acquiring and developing great country es- 

199 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

tates ; the merely well-to-do follow a like im- 
pulse in a more modest way; poorer people 
swell the vast army of summer-boarders ; and 
in the great towns, families too poor to get 
their children out of town in summer are 
helped to send them, sometimes hundreds of 
miles, to volunteer grandparents who have 
fields and farm-houses and kind hearts. And 
so, while the country comes to town as much 
as ever, the town each year gets back to the 
country more generally than ever before. It 
is a most important interchange — good for the 
country and vitally necessary for the towns. 
It is an easy matter, and quickly done, to get 
the hay-seed out of the locks of any likely lad, 
but the locks that never had any hay-seed in 
them are apt to drop out over-soon. 

Country development may be incomplete, 
but city development tends to be narrow, and 
it is a far easier matter to expand and refine 
the one than to supply the deficiencies of the 
other. 









WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 




In the summer the country gets due atten- 
tion from the city people, but the country 
winters still belong almost altogether to the 
various folk who really live in the country — 
the farmers, villagers, and to some extent, of 
course, the suburbanites. 

Our country clubs have skating-ponds and 
toboggan-slides, and a few enterprising peo- 
ple rush out of town, when they get a chance, 
and use them. When I lived in the country 
we skated on shallows on the edge of the lake, 
or up the brooks to the swamps that fed them, 
and the winter ponds that bordered the 
swamps. There were musk-rats under the ice 
in the swamps and the swamp -ponds; and 
musk-rats under the ice make mighty interest- 
ing skating for the boy on top. And the 

201 




THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




streams — how fascinating it was to follow 
them up after winter had taken hard hold 
of them! Where the ice in a brook is good, 
it is good, and where it is bad there is al- 
ways the excited anticipation of a reach of 
particularly good ice, or maybe a flooded 
meadow, a little way farther up. 

Unless you really live in the country you 
will miss the great snow-storms; and it is a 
pity to go through life without knowledge of 
them. Whittier's " Snow-Bound" is the fruit 
of one of them. In Blackmore's Lorna Doone 
there is an admirable record of another which 
is bound to linger long in any mind that takes 
it in. Hawthorne, too, saw snow-storms and 
made record of them. The country values 
its winter excitements, for they are somewhat 
rare, and a great snow-storm is the chief of 
them. There are two notable kinds — the 
blizzard that comes with wind and cold, when 
the fine snow drifts furiously, and the quiet 
storm when the flakes are often clumps of 
exquisite crystals, and fall fast and silent- 
ly, blanketing the landscape, and adorning 

202 





WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 

the trees with a decoration of astonishing 
beauty. 

It begins to snow, say, about noon, and 
snows diligently, with no stops for rest. By 
five o'clock the snow-plough is out, and there 
is shovelling of paths to the barn and the road 
and wherever paths are necessary. Instead 
of stopping at sundown, it buckles to and 
snows harder Before you go to bed it is 
eighteen inches deep on a level. It becomes 
interesting. You begin to speculate as to 
when it will stop. 

The first thing in the morning you look out 
of the window and see — nothing but snow; 
snow everywhere, on the ground, on the trees, 
covering the handle of the pump out of sight, 
making mere mounds of the smaller shrubs, 
bending down the limbs of the tall evergreens 
until they look like Chinese pagodas. No 
paths anywhere — mere slight depressions 
where the paths were last night. And the 
road as you see it from the window is still 
smooth and white from fence to fence. No 
sleigh track yet ; no one has got through. Here 

203 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




is delightful excitement for children, and oc- 
cupation and more or less exhilaration for 
every one. The first track is made by the 
hired man wading through the snow to the 
barn. Sausages and buckwheat - cakes for 
breakfast on such a morning, and then path- 
finding, road-breaking, and shovelling all the 
rest of the morning, and all day long if the 
storm keeps on. 

After it has snowed three feet on a level 
the storm begins to be a phenomenon, and 
there is hourly speculation as to whether it 
will break a record, and how much it will 
obstruct the railroads, and when the news- 
papers will come and tell all about it. For 
the time being it is the only topic. Present- 
ly the road-breakers come down the road, 
driving four or six wallowing horses before a 
lumber-sleigh, and once the snow stops fall- 
ing communication is soon resumed. But 
there are great heaps of snow, the result of 
shovelling, which the children burrow into 
and excavate for snow-houses, and these last 
until the next big thaw. 

204 








WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 



The fine snow driven hard and fast by a bit- 
ter north wind is just as interesting, though 
not so beautiful, because it does not stay on 
the trees. That combination makes drifts and 
packs tight, and means more hard work and 
much longer interruption of communication. 
A winter evening by a bright fire is better 
than ever when such a storm is raging out- 
side, and when it blows and snows itself out 
by daylight, and the sun rises clear on a 
sparkling landscape, the sight of that, and to 
breathe the sharp, clean air, are something 
to live for and remember. Very beautiful, 
too, in their results, are the storms that coat 
the limbs of the trees and shrubs with ice 
that glitters wonderfully in the sunlight, and 
gives a fairy-palace effect to everything in 
sight. But the ice - storms, besides being 
harmful to the trees, have not the spiritual 
effect that the great, silent snow-storms have. 
Death itself is not more tranquil than the 
noiseless fall of the flakes, and the great snow 
blanket, soft and spotless, is the most peace- 
ful thing to look at in nature. It shuts out 

205 








THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

all ugliness, smooths all rough places, softens 
all harsh angles. The most material mind 
can hardly help being soothed and rested by 
it, and the contemplative spirit sees earth, 
for once, sweet, pure, and millennial. 

The pictures of nature that most of us have 
most in our minds were stored there not with 
intention prepense, but because they imposed 
themselves on our attention. The snow and 
the snow pictures are an unavoidable part of 
the Northern country-dweller's winter envi- 
ronment, and whether he has little or much 
of the painter's appreciation of landscape, 
they do ordinarily take a hold on his mind. 
He may not be able to discourse to edifica- 
tion about his winters, as Mr. Kipling did 
about snowy Brattleboro, but the crispness 
of the snow and the creak of the runners 
on cold days penetrate his consciousness, too. 
The pictures of landscape that stick most in- 
effaceably in our minds are those that took 
hold there when we were children. They be- 
come part of our capital stock of impres- 
sions, which we add to as long as our 

206 





WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 

capacity for receiving visual impressions 
lasts. 

Human interests add very much to the at- 
tractions of the country in winter, and here in 
the East I suppose country life in winter is 
somewhat less rich in human interest, and 
consequently less brisk, than it was fifty 
years ago. All districts that are near consid- 
erable cities have increased in population, 
but it is, in winter at least, a village popula- 
tion. The true rural districts have every- 
where suffered from the superior attractions 
of the towns, and that is natural. Since agri- 
cultural machinery has come to abound, few- 
er hands can do the work of a farm, and the 
surplus hands go elsewhere to other tasks. 
Would it pay now, do you suppose, to pile 
up the stone walls that are the familiar field 
boundaries all over New England ? I suppose 
not. One of the charms of New England 
farms as playthings is that so much work has 
been done on them and so little remains to 
be done that is commercially expedient. 

The great, steady winter jobs on an Ameri- 

207 






THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

can farm in the North nowadays are feeding 
the stock and keeping warm. And keeping 
warm nowadays means hauling coal. When 
I lived in the country it meant cutting wood. 
It meant, for our large family, constant team- 
ing day after day from the woods to the wood- 
yard, and a wood-pile that must have cov- 
ered quarter of an acre. It meant, towards 
spring, the coming of men with a horse-power 
and buzz-saw to cut firewood, and that was 
almost as interesting an operation as thrash- 
ing. It meant also a pretty constant proces- 
sion past the front door of sleighs loaded with ' 
wood on their way to market, and a boy could 
hitch a hand-sleigh on behind any of them 
and ride two or three miles down the road, 
returning at a better pace behind an empty 
one. 

There were other stirring days when the 
lake had frozen hard and the ice-house was 
filled, involving ice-cutting, and more team- 
ing, and more precarious hitching on behind 
loads and going back in empties. And early 
in the winter there was the momentous and 

208 






WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 

gory killing of pigs. Oh, that was indeed a 
stirring time! They kill a pig every second, 
no doubt, in Chicago nowadays, but that is 
mere mechanical routine with no quality of 
sport in it. When we killed, there was a fire 
where the brook ran through the big barn- 
yard, and kettles hung over it from a pole, 
and water boiled in them. From time to 
time there were the horrifying shrieks of the 
murdered swine, which were pretty blood- 
curdling, though interesting as incidents. 
There were bladders to blow up, too; there 
was at last the row of pigs hanging stark, 
clean, and handsome in the crisp twilight; 
and following that, the cutting-up, the salt- 
ingdown of pork, the curing and smoking of 
hams, the making of sausages, head-cheese, 
and souse, and, at leisure, the eating of them. 
There was nothing so very slow about the 
country winter in days as late as the civil war. 
I suppose soap-making as a domestic industry 
is as dead as household spinning. In those 
times of wood-fires and wood-ashes all self- 
respecting families made soap. Our family 

209 





s& 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

had an outstanding kitchen expressly for that 
use, with a big, cistern-like hogshead behind it 
in which ashes were leached, and convenient 
tubs for holding the soft soap. A very hand- 
some substance is soft soap of the proper con- 
sistency and complexion, and a pleasing ex- 
ercise it used to be for the young to stir it 
with a stick and watch its undulations. All 
the superfluous fat of meat from our kitchen 
was eventually turned into soft soap in those 
near-by old times. 

They really were better times to winter in 
the country than these days of ready-made 
and coal-oil incubation. Is an incubator in- 
teresting ? Oh yes, commercially. Anything 
that makes money is interesting. But there 
is a personal charm about hens that no incu- 
bator can rival. The wiles of hens in secre- 
ting eggs, the finding of nests, and the cau- 
tious, light-fingered speculation as to the age 
and condition of the eggs in them, used to 
help out the country winters. 

We had, besides the stable, a big farm- 
barn, built to hold a lot of hay, and standing 

210 





WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 

at a convenient height from the ground for 
perverse hens to lay under, and for other 
young bipeds to crawl under in search of eggs. 
Such a barn is a very desirable adjunct to 
winter country life. This one had a frame 
of great oak beams and an extension of con- 
necting sheds, and when all its upper part had 
been filled with hay, the hay -mows were the 
finest places imaginable to play in in winter. 
All the various hide-and-seek games could be 
played to advantage in connection with them, 
and you could make dens and burrows in 
them where apples could be stored and suit- 
able books deposited for consideration at 
times when for any reason it was prudent or 
convenient for one to stay away from the 
house. 

And of course the barn, being a farm-barn, 
was duly furnished with cows, and had a big 
straw -stack in the barn-vard. Cows are ex- 
cellent society in winter, if you see enough 
of them to give them a place in your daily life. 
All animals help out socially in the country in 
winter, and so may some of the vegetables. 

211 







53^ 



THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 

For my part, I used to find appreciable social 
advantages in the company of apples. A 
peck or two, or even a barrel or two, of apples 
from the grocer's can hardly be considered 
company, but thirty or forty barrels of various 
apples standing back in the cellar, with mov- 
able covers convenient for an inspector with 
pockets, are a different matter. They con- 
stitute a collection delightful to the eye, stim- 
ulating to the imagination, and affording food 
for observation, reflection, and comparison, 
as well as convenient physical refreshment. 
Doughnuts have consoling characteristics, 
especially when taken with cider on a winter 
evening, but I never found in them the same 
sort of companionship that there was in apples. 
Perhaps, they came too few in a batch, or 
lasted too short a time, or were all too much 
alike. 

But, after all, the best and most companion- 
able property of all that we had was the li- 
brary. That was rather remarkable, not be- 
cause it was so very big or so very valuable, 
but because of its scope and flavor. There 

212 









WINTER IN THE COUNTRY 

were three or four thousand books in it, shelv- 
ed almost from floor to ceiling, ranging from 
folios up to duodecimos, and from black letter Jj 
up to the types of Franklin Square. Very- 
few of the books were of later date than Ma- 
caulay's History, but it was a good, old-fash- 
ioned collection, gathered at his leisure by a 
lover of good books, from book-stalls and im- 
porters' counters. It held a deal of good read- 
ing and some bad ; it was seasoned and homely 
and inspiring, and if it did not include the 
record of all human knowledge, it at least 
contained clews to pretty much all that was 
known .up to the middle of the nineteenth 
century, and could put you in touch with all 
the more notable human beings in the world's 
history. 

To sit in that library with a book, and look 
out from time to time across the snow to the 
ice-bound lake, or to sit there of a winter even- 
ing before the open wood fire with good old 
books all about, was a detail of human ex- 
perience that I do not often see bettered in 
cities. If you have once got used to the 

213 





THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN 




town and its various stimulations, you may 
feel the need of reverting to it from time to 
time, even if it doesn't claim you altogether. 
But don't imagine that you really know the 
country until you have tried it, and tried it 
intelligently, in winter, when the flies are 
gone and the mosquitoes are all dead, and 
the great business of life is just to live and 
invite your soul. 








THE END 







OCT 37 1904! 



